{"id":30384,"date":"2017-08-17T19:36:17","date_gmt":"2017-08-18T02:36:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spikpc.wpengine.com\/news\/pianist-invites-you-to-gather-hear\/"},"modified":"2017-08-17T19:36:17","modified_gmt":"2017-08-18T02:36:17","slug":"pianist-invites-you-to-gather-hear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peninsulaclarion.com\/2017\/08\/17\/pianist-invites-you-to-gather-hear\/","title":{"rendered":"Pianist invites you to gather, hear"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note: This story has been changed to correct the length of Sawada’s Alaska tour.<\/em><\/p>\n

Anyone who wants to hear classical piano music played live usually has to travel wherever the piano and pianist are \u2014 most frequently to a concert hall or auditorium. Classical pianist Miki Sawada hopes for a different experience by taking her less-than-portable instrument on the road.<\/p>\n

This weekend the Brooklyn-based Sawada will be landing in Anchorage for her first visit to Alaska, where she\u2019ll spend three weeks hauling a piano around in a moving van for almost daily performances. Sawada and her piano will be stopping for seven planned shows \u2014 and a few unplanned ones, she hopes \u2014 on the Kenai Peninsula, appearing at Moose Pass\u2019 Trail Lake Lodge, Veronica\u2019s Cafe in Kenai, Odie\u2019s Deli in Soldotna, and other locations before heading to Talkeetna for a second week of performances in the north.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt its core it\u2019s a very whimsical idea, and I hope people find it weird and surprising enough to be attracted,\u201d Sawada said.<\/p>\n

A filmmaker will follow the two-week Alaska tour, producing a documentary that Sawada hopes will also give insights to the places she visits. The name of the project is Gather Hear Alaska, a pun most obviously on \u201cgather here,\u201d but with other possible meanings as well, Sawada said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could put a comma after \u2018gather,\u2019 like \u2018Gather, hear Alaska\u2019 \u2014 telling everybody else to listen to Alaska, because I\u2019m hoping for the documentary film to get a really neat portrait of Alaskan communities,\u201d Sawada said. \u201cYou could also put a comma after \u2018gather hear, Alaska.\u2019 That would be like beckoning Alaska to gather.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sawada, funded in part with a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum, will be renting a moving van in Anchorage and loading up the piano \u2014 a hybrid digital instrument supplied by Anchorage\u2019s Classic Pianos \u2014 and driving south to do her first scheduled stop at Cooper Landing on Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I\u2019m going to have a group of pieces that I can mix and choose from at any point, so depending on the crowd I can wing it,\u201d Sawada said.<\/p>\n

She\u2019ll choose the pieces without focusing on specific eras or styles, but with the criteria that they be concise and engaging.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the pieces are around three minutes long, and focus on getting one core idea across, which makes them enjoyable and accessible to both classical music connoisseurs and first-time listeners,\u201d Sawada wrote in an email.<\/p>\n

They may include compositions by Bach, Schumann, Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, as well as pieces written for her by contemporary composers. One will be \u201cThe Same Trail,\u201d by Homer native Conrad Winslow. Winslow now lives in Brooklyn also, where Sawada wrote that the two of them \u201crun in the same circles, but haven\u2019t had a chance to meet each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also in her Alaska repertoire will be pieces Sawada herself has composed with another unusual element for classical music: audience participation. These, Sawada said, were based on the ideas of early electronic composer Pauline Oliveros, who in the early 1970s created a series of \u201csonic meditations,\u201d written as verbal instructions rather than scores and designed to bring attentive listening to sounds both musical and mundane \u2014 to \u201cexplore the idea of the division between composer and audience, what is music, what is not,\u201d Sawada said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you\u2019ll have people standing up, making noise, engaging with other people and also with the space,\u201d Sawada said.<\/p>\n

Engagement between audience members, she said, is not usually a part of the traditional concert-hall performance, where attention is supposed to flow strictly from audience members to the performer, in a space divorced from the listener\u2019s everyday life. When she sets up her piano in Veronica\u2019s and Odie\u2019s, she\u2019ll be aiming for the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want it to happen in places that are familiar to everyone, already a gathering space,\u201d Sawada said. \u201cAnd they\u2019ll sit around me, like in a half circle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sawada has played her share of traditional concert-hall concerts, but also spent the first four months of 2016 doing nightly performances with a resident quintet aboard a cruise ship, for an audience who hadn\u2019t necessarily come aboard hoping to hear classical music.<\/p>\n

A self-described \u201cnomad,\u201d she\u2019s performed in many venues traditional and otherwise. The stable point in these environments, she said, is the piano itself \u2014 an earlier title of her project was \u201cHome is where the piano is.\u201d She\u2019ll be doing her Alaska road trip (anticipating what may be a similar tour of the Lower 48 in the future) with the intent to share this feeling.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome classical music is very difficult,\u201d Sawada said. \u201cBut there\u2019s such a wide range. I just think it has to be presented in a more engaging way. Not in a way that\u2019s watered down or dumbed down ever. Just in a way that\u2019s more thoughtful about what people want or what people need. And they may not even know they need it in their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

This goal is \u201cthe serious side of it,\u201d Sawada said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI also just thought it would be fun to put a piano in a van,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Reach Ben Boettger at benjamin.boettger@cmg-northwest2.go-vip.net\/peninsulaclarion.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note: This story has been changed to correct the length of Sawada’s Alaska tour. 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