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Friday, 11 July 2008
Interview with Marilyn Nonken
It's definitely an ongoing struggle, if that's the right word, to balance
my awareness of myself (which is necessary to performing well) with a
desire to simply be a pure vessel through which the music passes. In the
best of my performances, I can sense the composer and the music operating
through me; and this focus enables me to put my own head aside and get to
a higher level of "selfless" performance. ...
It can be risky to view musical performance as heightened reality,
rather than an alternative to reality, or an illusion. Onstage, I am a
real person, not a "persona." The people for whom I play are just that:
individuals, not a faceless or generic "audience." We bring to our
experience together preferences, histories, and expectations, and this is
a volatile combination. This kind of immediate, intimate encounter is as
far as one gets from an abstract cultural construct. And personal
encounters, as everyone knows, are the riskiest kind.
Photo: Sharka Bosokova
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Because
much of this remains fascinating from performance, music and
theatre perspectives (and for other reasons besides), I repost my 2006
interview with pianist Marilyn Nonken today. In the interview, she
discusses the role of gender in performance, her experience working with
Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories, aesthetic and everyday
perception, as well as a wealth of other issues. To update Marilyn's
biography briefly, she is currently the Director of Piano Studies at NYU/Steinhardt; other
relevant updates are in the introduction to the interview.
Posted at 7.56 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
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