Interview
from Fanfare magizine July/August 2003
Christopher
Taylor: Musician and Polymath by
JAMES REEL
Fanfare - July/August 2003 (reproduced and posted with
permission from the editor, Joel Flegler)
Critics have described pianist Christopher
Taylor's performances, from memory,
of
Messiaen 's two-and-a-quarter-hour
cycle
Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus with
terms
like "astonishing
achievement". But Taylor eats
Messiaen scores for breakfast, moving
on to computer programming for lunch,
and philosophy and linguistics for
dinner. Calling
Taylor
merely a pianist-albeit one of "gladiatorial
courage," according
to one New York
Times critic-is like
describing Thomas Jefferson as a fellow
interested
in agricultural
reform: It's perfectly true, and accords with
the man's primary image of himself,
but it
ignores the
full range of his
activities. Now, Taylor's extramusical
interests do qualify
as hobbies, whereas the piano is his
career. Yet,
this mere hobbyist has co-written
a scholarly philosophy
article for the
Oxford Free Hil1 Handbook, and he is
developing
a compiler for a new computer programming language.
And he's done
this while living a
fairly conventional
life, commuting by bicycle from his home (shared with his
musicologist-wife
Denise Pilmer Taylor and their young
daughter EIlie) to his job as assistant professor
of piano
at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison. Taylor is
engaged in life as well as in music and the intellect.
At age thirty-three, Taylor boasts impressive credentials
even when the subject is restricted
to music. He took up piano as a kid in Boulder, Colorado,
and went on to
study with Francisco Aybar, Russell
Sherman, and Maria Curcio Diamand. In 1990, he
took first
prize in the William
Kapell International Piano Competition
and became one
of the first recipients of the Irving S.
Gilmore Young
Artist Award. In 1993, he took the
bronze medal in the Van Clibun International Piano Competition,
having the
year before graduated summa cum laude
from Harvard with a degree in mathematics. The Avery
Fischer
Career Grant
came in 1996, and along the way, he
has amassed a sheaf of
highly positive reviews in major
papers. He's the
sort of pianist who can finish off
a
recital of the Bach Chaconne, Boulez Sonata No.2, and
Beethoven op. III with
a Joplin encore. Taylor's most recent
recording surveys Liszt's Transcendental Etudes for the
Liszt Digital
label. That company, like
its parent organization, the Denver
Center for
Liszt Studies, usually emphasizes
the more spiritual
side of
Liszt, which is the
preoccupation of
director Mary Kay Kapustka, whom Taylor
has known
for two
decades." I
have known Kit through my piano teacher
connections since he was
about ten
or eleven," says Kapustka. "His
genius was evident at a very early
age."
It
was Kapustka herself who asked Taylor
to record these studies
in the potential
and limitations of
the flesh rather than the spirit. "
My sense is that Mary Kay's main ambition is to get as
much Liszt recorded as shecan, and
it occurred to her pretty
early on that it would be fun
for me to do some
of it," says Taylor. "The
Transcendental Etudes is an amazing
set I had been thinking
about learning
complete for a long time,
so it seemed
like a logical plan for me to start
with this."
"
The Transcendental Etudes fit into my mission," Kapustka
explains, "because the spirituality
'thread' is present in Liszt's music
throughout his
whole life. Yes,
it is the
music from his later years
that got me started in my immersion
as a full-fledged
Lisztian,
but exploring
this music, researching and examining
scores and books, listening to every
CD I could
get
my hands
on, opened
up an exciting new world for me and
I made it my mission to get this neglected
music
'out there.'
The Etudes are
not exactly neglected literature, but
not before Christopher's recording
has there
been a performance
that not only
captures and conquers every unimaginable
technical challenge but also reveals
the deep spiritual
treasures
that are
in these works. I knew Christopher
did not have the recordings out there
that
he deserves
to
have, and so I asked him
if he would record
the Etudes for my
new label, and the daredevil said yes.
Christopher
presents
the hidden treasures
in these Etudes in such a way that
really listening to the complete set
as Christopher
plays them
is a transforming,
'transcendental' experience. The spirituality
that is so much a part of this music
shines through this performance
in a way that
touches the listener
deeply. Most listeners would probably
not label
this phenomenon
as spirituality,
but that is how Christopher's transcendental
performance
of these great pieces affects me."
"
They're incredibly profound works," says Taylor. "They're
not little finger studies,
and despite
their difficulty they're not vapid Liszt
bravura,
that cheesy mid-Romantic
showiness you find in some ofhis other
music. It's a fabulous set. It's really
amazing to consider that the
first ideas for the set came when he
was fifteen or sixteen years old.
You can look
at those
original ideas, and
even though it's Czerny-like stuff,
already this incredible gift he had for melody is
showing
through.
And in the
final version, you have
to be impressed
by his
incredible use of the instrument, and
the use of his vast technique
for such novel and remarkable ends.
It's quite amazing. Particularly incredible for
me is
the last one, 'Chasse-neige'.
Nothing before or probably since sounds
quite like it, using the tremolos and
the chromatic
scales
to evoke
the desolation of a winter blizzard,
with snow swirling everywhere, and on top
of it are such
gorgeous melodies,
with evocative harmonization. That's
one of my favorite pieces. I learned the entire
set
not
long ago,
but I'd
already learned various individual
etudes over the years. The first, I think,
was
'Paysage,' when I was ten or
eleven. In junior high there was 'Harmonies
du soir,' and in high school 'Chasse-neige'
and
'Feux follets.'
Then here and there over the years
there'd
be
one or two more. The last ones fell
into place last
summer.
A number of them I had performed individually
over the years, but it was only twice
that I performed
the whole
set before I recorded it. I don't think
there was any disadvantage to not having
lived
with them
all longer;
I like to think the recording has a
certain freshness to it. But I don't
doubt my approach
to it will
be different in 20 years' time."
Similarly, Taylor had mastered portions of Messiaen's
Vingt regards only weeks before he
first performed the entire cycle. Messiaen's Catholic mysticism
would seem
to be a natural fit for Liszt Digital,
which does not confine itself to Liszt's music, but Taylor
hints that
he's more likely to record Beethoven
sonatas before turning to the Vingt regards.
"
I've been debating about how I'd like to go about recording
that piece," he says. "There's
been talk of putting it on a DVD, for
instance, and I'm not
sure Mary
Kay wants to do something like that.
A couple of people have mentioned to
me that
when
I
perform it, the visual
side of the performance is an interesting
and possibly
illuminating ingredient, and that a
DVD would have a sense of what's physically
involved
and give
more of
a feeling of a live performance. It
seems
like that might be a creative use of
the medium.
"
I have pretty diverse taste buds," Taylor notes. "From
a fairly early age I had adventuresome
tastes, but getting into 20th-century
music didn't
happen automatically for
me; it took a certain amount of effort.
When I was fourteen or fifteen I went
to Interlochen
for
the first time,
and I took a class on 20th-century
music and I sensed there was something
I'd been
missing out
on. That class
opened my mind, and it no longer offended
me
if a piece didn't end with a five-one
cadence. That
was a continuation
of a broadening process that dates
way back. When I first got involved in
music,
Beethoven
was the
alpha and omega
for me. In due course Bach came on
board, and then Schubert and Brahms and
Mozart.
Then, in subsequent
years, Berg
and Schoenberg and even BouJez and
Messiaen and Elliott Carter and whatnot.
"
I haven't gotten involved in commissioning pieces so
much, although that's probably something
I will be doing in future years; there's grant money at
the university
that will help me do that sort of thing.
I've become friends with a number of composers. One close
alliance
I have is with Derek Bermel; I met
him at the University of Michigan while he was studying
there with William
Bolcom. He wrote for me this piano
suite called Turning that
I've performed quite a bit; it's
become one of his
most successful pieces." Taylor
recorded Turning, along with Bolcom's
Twelve New
Etudes, for the
JDR label in 2001.
Taylor is obviously willing to go out
on a limb, which is surely a characteristic
that
made
him
compatible with
his teacher Russell Sherman, a provocative
pianist whose Beethoven recordings
once ignited a months-long
debate
in these pages over whether he was
a probing,
adventuresome interpreter or a wrong-headed
violator of the score.
As you might expect, Sherman the teacher
did not drill into Taylor a single "correct" way
to approach a particular piece. "Lessons
with him are a remarkable experience," Taylor
says. "He
certainly could easily have been a
poet if he hadn't
turned out to be
a pianist. The imagery he teaches with
is very striking; he uses evocative
words and
suggestive
metaphors to describe
certain passages or details. All those
metaphors stick in the brain nicely
and provide material
for reflection,
so even if you don't buy his interpretation,
you at least
get certain vivid ideas
you can work out
for yourself.
And quite often, of course, you get
handy tips about the mechanics and
technique
of playing
a piece. The most
important
thing I learned from him
is difficult to summarize in a sentence,
but I guess
it would be a general approach,
a searching, inquiring approach to
music, the philosophy of not looking
for the one
right
answer, but exploring
every facet of the score, and thinking
on a higher plane than getting the
notes right
and
getting
them pretty."
Some major critics, like the New York Times's Anthony
Tommasini and the Boston Globe's
Richard Dyer, who have heard Taylor
develop over the years have recently
detected
a softening and tenderness
in Taylor's playing, which they used
to find somewhat mechanically precise.
Tommasini
once called Taylor's
fingers "search-and-destroy units
zapping the keys, working at the behest
of his probing mind and keen imagination." In
other words, he's now playing less
like an impress-the-jury competition
pianist and more like a career artist. "I'm
certainly a lot more experienced, and
I suppose I've mellowed with age," Taylor
says. "I've
discovered on my own a lot of new tricks
of the trade; I know quite
a bit more now about the personalities
of the different instruments and how
to approach
a
strange instrument
in a strange hall and what to tell
the technician if the piano isn't adequate,
and so many
things along those
lines. Also, I try to assimilate as
much
new music as I can in the time I have
available, and to have
a new
understanding and a larger database
with which
to compare each piece I play. I've
done quite a bit of reading in
philosophy, and in the philosophy of
mind and cognitive science, so I feelI
have
a better
understanding of how the mind works,
and that's useful in learning
a piece
and understanding the nature of creating
works of art."
Sherman once said that Taylor has "a computer brain
and the naivete and purity of a Parsifal." Asked
if he recognizes himself in that remark,
Taylor laughs. "That's
a typically Shermanesque way to characterize
things! He's got a point, I suppose.
Certainly I have
an
affinity for computers; that's one
of my hobbies, actually-programming.
The rigorous sequential thinking required
for operating a computer also comes
in
handy in
playing Messiaen.
As for the Parsifal aspect, I'm not
sure. I suppose I like
to think of my own approach as being
fairly direct; I dislike what I feel
is mannered
playing, so
I try to
keep things simple. I suppose alluding
to Parsifal, a very simple, direct
character, might be a
way of making
the same point."
Taylor admits that he majored in mathematics
in part to have something to fall back
on
if music
didn't work
out, but that wasn't the only reason. "It
was nice to have an
insurance policy," he
says, "but
even if l' d known back then that a
career in music would work out as well
as it has,
I don't
think
that would
have changed my decision. The main
objective was to promote a diversity
in my mind,
to encourage the kind of thinking
and
rigor that is required to study
mathematics. Not many people appreciate
what an elegant
and beautiful
art form good mathematics is. It's
not dry equations and so forth. It
has a very
profound,
symmetrical
type of beauty of its own. That's why
I think mathematics
and music tend to appeal to the same
types of people, and often to the very
same
people.
Music
and mathematics
both involve a certain abstraction;
they're a bit removed
from the representation of everyday
life and everyday language. Yet at
the same
time
both
appeal
in a
rather mysterious way to an abstract
aesthetic sensibility,
music in a more immediate way and certainly
in a more common way. That's one reason
mathematics isn't as popular
as music, but partly it's because mathematics
is not taught all that well, and there's
so much
emphasis
on
the dry technique. It's sort of like
if all we could listen to in the first 10
or 15
years of
our life was
Czerny and Hanon, music wouldn't be
very popular, either."
One of Taylor's other pastimes is the
study of linguistics, which fits right
in with
his other
interests. “Again,
language is one of these abstract systems," he
says. "The
incredible thing about language is
it's vastly complex-even to this day
there
are still
aspects of the English language
that linguists haven't been able to
figure out-and yet every child, by
the age of
three, has a command
of these
incredibly difficult rules. That amazes
and fascinates me."
Many people in the sciences are very
musical; they play an instrument themselves,
or
at least they
love to listen
to music. But few musicians are scientific,
as Taylor admits. "Yeah, it's
less common in the other direction,
and I'm not 100 percent sure why," he
says. "The
uncharitable way to look at it is that
scientists need some sort of fulfillment
in some more
sensual art form,
and musicians don't feel the same lack
in their lives. And most musicians
unfortunately have
had their love
of mathematics or science drilled out
of them since high school. Perhaps
in some
utopia
where
the teaching
of
science is at a more aesthetic level,
that might change those proportions."
Taylor comes by his balance of interests
naturally; his mother taught high school
English, and
his father is
a physics professor. "Neither
of my parents is a musician, but my
father did study the flute seriously
while he was growing up, and there
was always a lot of
music around the house," he says. "That
got me started on a musical path. The
mathematical interests
and the computer interests-I certainly
inherited some of that from my father,
but I know very
little physics,
actually, even though that's his field.
It's just that from a fairly early
age the interest
in music,
the interest
in mathematics, the interest in language,
they just grabbed me, and there was
no question of my resisting them because
they were too important to me."
Taylor's interest in philosophy developed
later. "I
came into philosophy through the back
door, through reading treatises on
mathematical logic by early
20th-century
philosophers like Russell and Wittgenstein.
Then I became interested in more recent
philosophers. Probably ten
years ago I discovered Daniel Dennett;
his thinking
about consciousness and evolutionary
science
and the workings
of the mind, free will, all of those
things, has influenced me a great deal.
When I
was back in
Boston working on
my master's degree, I took some classes
at Tufts University, where Dennett
teaches, and I wound
up in a couple of
his seminars, including one on free
will. As it turns out, we ended up
collaborating
on
a paper
that was sort
of a version of one I turned in to
him in
that seminar. That's been published
now.
" During the summers and during my vacation time, computing
is my primary way to kick back and
enjoy myself. I do a variety of things, including some Windows programming,
although I don't consider that terribly
much fun because the operating system is so quirky and complex and unpredictable.
I do a fair amount of Linux programming,
and I'm compiling a new computer language. That's a never-ending project,
but it's very gratifying to design
your own
language and make your own rules. If there's some irritating
grammatical rule, you can change it."
Musical rules aren't so malleable, at least not when
you're playing someone else's score.
But if anyone can analyze the rules to the point of mastery,
and then convey
them to the rest of us in a way that's
aesthetically meaningful, it's Christopher Taylor.
Fanfare July/August
2003
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Christopher Taylor, piano
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