Katherine Dowling Interview
Below is the transcript to my interview with the brilliant Canadian pianist Katherine Dowling. You’ll find the podcast, video, and show notes with all the links at this button below.
Katherine Dowling (00:00:00):
I really learned that the limitations on students are not real, whether they're self-imposed or imposed by the prejudice of a teacher, maybe known or unknown, they're illusory. And it's the biggest disservice we can do as a teacher is to assume a limitation and a lack of access doesn't need to be a kind of period at the end of the sentence.
Leah Roseman (00:00:26):
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Katherine Dowling is a brilliant Canadian pianist and in this conversation we talked about her album of solo music by Alice Ping Yee Ho, mentors including Gil Kalish and Henk Guittart, and how and why she’s developed her exceptional musical memory. Katherine shared fantastic insights into teaching and learning, the importance of inclusivity and access to arts education, and how she uses the Pomodoro technique in the practice room. She explained how sound production on the piano is about the speed of attack and we discussed different skill sets and career paths for pianists. Dr. Dowling shared many inspiring musical memories, and how she developed her ambitious Elegy project to follow her personal path through grief. You’ll be hearing some clips from the album Awake and Dreaming, which you’ll find linked in the show notes, and you can use the timestamps to navigate the eipsode. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript to my website Leahroseman.com .It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the description of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast and other episodes that may interest you.
(00:01:47):
Hi, Katherine. Thanks so much for joining me here today.
Katherine Dowling (00:01:50):
Hi, Leah. I really, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Leah Roseman (00:01:54):
So you have this wonderful, relatively new album, and you've done many collaborative albums, but it's your first solo piano album.
Katherine Dowling (00:02:02):
That's right. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:02:04):
So I just happened to run into your friend Amy Hillis at a rehearsal this week, and she told me that she introduced you to the music of Alice Ping Yee Ho.
Katherine Dowling (00:02:12):
She did, and I'm hugely indebted to her for that. I played for Amy, well, we've known each other since childhood, but I was playing for her for the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition in 2018. And she had this really beautiful program, really trying to represent the whole country, people from different parts of the country, people from different backgrounds. And one of the works was a gorgeous violin piano piece Coeur a Coeur by Alice Ho, and I had heard her name. I mean, she's very prolific, but I had never actually played any of her music and discovered it that way. And what was really amazing was then Amy won the competition. So we got to tour the program, including Alice's piece for her whole tour. And because Amy, as you may know, is a very meticulous person, she arranged for us to work with the composers leading up to the competition, so we would really have that inside scoop, so to speak, on each of the works. So then I got to meet Alice personally and work with her on that piece, and that really got my real love for her as a person and for her music going.
Leah Roseman (00:03:19):
Now most people listening aren't Canadian, so they won't know about this competition. Do you want to just speak to that because you mentioned it?
Katherine Dowling (00:03:25):
Oh, sure. So this is a competition, I believe it's the 48th year. This year. It's for Canadian young artists, and it's focused on music since 1950, and music that is by Canadian composers. So I believe the programs have to be 50% Canadian works and 100% works since about 1950, and it cycles. So every year it is either for pianists, string players or vocalists. And the prize is I think, what makes it really special in addition to the repertoire. But the prize is actually a concert tour across the country. So the young artists not only receives a cash prize, but they also have this opportunity to share their program much more broadly, to interact with audiences and to have a really wonderful tour experience. I'm super privileged to have been on that tour twice in 2015 with violinist Joshua Peters, who's now a member of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. And then in 2018 with Amy Hillis, who you mentioned, a Toronto based violinist. And I was actually just finished up being on the jury for the preliminary round of this year's piano competition. So it's a really great organization.
Leah Roseman (00:04:36):
What's your experience being on juries? I'm curious what your feelings about competitions in general.
Katherine Dowling (00:04:42):
What a question. Right. I mean, I certainly, I'll say in the most ideal sense, a competition is a opportunity for striving together, which I believe is the root word of the term competition, though a linguist can check me on that, where artists, whether they're young artists, professionals, children are really in pursuit of this higher goal of improving their artistry and communicating something. At worst, though, of course, I think they take away everything beautiful about the art form and they reduce it to just the kind of comparative cheep thrills approach. And I think we get both extremes and then everywhere in between, certainly in the pianistic world. One kind of competitive form though that I have had really wonderful experiences with is the regional music festival system where I've adjudicated extensively and to go to a town of maybe 300 people and the whole town shuts down during the music festival. So everyone can come and listen to these young players share in performance what they've been working on all year, and to have feedback from an adjudicator and to have the support of their community, that would be probably the most ideal and probably the least kind of competitiony example of that. But yeah, I think all musicians, we have pretty mixed opinions of competitions.
Leah Roseman (00:06:06):
Yeah, it's interesting you said that about the regional music festivals because my experience in Ottawa as a teacher, very few people participate for a size of the city. Very few people go to listen. So maybe it used to be different, but that's kind of disappointing. It's kind of devolved.
Katherine Dowling (00:06:23):
Sure, sure. That's so interesting. Yeah, I think I'm from Saskatchewan and the music festival, it's a mainstay of life, and so many aspects of public life in Saskatchewan have kind of gone by the wayside in the information age. And of course, you don't need to go to the local hardware store anymore. You can drive to the city or order on Amazon. But one aspect of public life that does seem to still be very strong is the music festival system. And also maybe on the prairies, because there are not great concert halls and young artist academies, maybe that music festival system has really filled a role in a way that keeps people, teachers as well as community members engaged.
Leah Roseman (00:07:06):
I've noticed it has become more inclusive of different styles of music. There's traditional Chinese instruments now, and so yeah, it's interesting. We should keep supporting that. Well, let's get back to your album.
Katherine Dowling (00:07:17):
Sure.
Leah Roseman (00:07:18):
So the title, I want to get this right, Awake and Dreaming is not one of the titles of the compositions.
Katherine Dowling (00:07:25):
That's right. I found coming up with the title to be extremely challenging, but I landed on this with Alice's approval. There's something about all of her music, not only the pieces I played on this album, but all of her works that to me, they make me incredibly present, that awakeness, I have to be not only pianistically, very, very present, highly virtuostic, but the sound world is really striking. It's arresting. And yet at the same time, there's something very otherworldly about her sound world, about her expression, her musical language. So I wanted to capture somehow in words that tension and that duality that I really do feel everywhere. And there's also a kind of surrealist nature to a lot of her music and something about that presence of awakeness and also that otherworldliness, of dreaming seemed to come together nicely. I also, there's a children's book by Kit Pearson when I was a girl called Awake and Dreaming, and it's about time travel, so that was very evocative to me as well. It's not, the album has nothing to do with the book other than that. Both, I suppose, are part of my artistic journey.
Leah Roseman (00:08:41):
That's really interesting. Now she's a pianist as well as a composer. So how did that affect you as an interpreter?
Katherine Dowling (00:08:49):
Oh, that's such a great question. I think we certainly had, between the two of us, a really direct way of relating to the music. Certainly I could speak with her about her intended effects sonically, like how she envisioned those being achieved physically. So to have that commonality between us was very helpful. And exploring with Alice how I might interpret her music, her notation made a lot of sense to me, both idiomatically as well as intellectually, but also, I hate the term, the canon because what does it really even mean? But so many of the luminaries of the pianistic canon were composers as well as performers. So all of my training when Mozart, even Bach, even pre piano, this keyboard player who composes has really been the lineage upon which all pianists stand. And so when I think about how might I contribute in my very small humble way in my small corner of the world, how might I contribute to broadening the canon, expanding it, a pianist composer is super attractive to me. I really feel, whether it's globally recognized or not in the profession, an artist like Alice who brings that performer interpreter experience into her compositional language, to me that's the same as I say Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Debussy and Ligeti, right up until Alice,
Leah Roseman (00:10:16):
I think it's on your website, you have this quote, exploring beauty that isn't nice or pretty.
Katherine Dowling (00:10:22):
Yes. That's I think, pretty foundational to the music that I'm drawn to. Not only music, I mean all forms of art. I feel. Of course, everyone likes things that are pretty, I have nothing against that, and I love it too, but there's such a world of expression beyond that. There's such a wealth of beauty that isn't pretty and smooth and easy, that is more arresting or more challenging, requires engagement in different parts of ourselves. And certainly, I love to hear music hear a sound, oh, I've never heard that before. And what's smooth and pretty tends to have the opposite effect on me. It's more familiar and soothing. A lot of the art that I'm drawn to music and other art I find very beautiful, but not very pretty necessarily.
Leah Roseman (00:11:14):
Now, I've listened to this album many times and I'm an experienced classical musician, but still it's difficult music. It took several listenings. So for people that are going to hear now some short excerpts, and of course the album's going to be directly linked in the show notes, how can we present this to the audience? Well, let's talk with what I wanted to include first. I think one of my favorite pieces is There Is No Night Without a Dawning, which was also part of this Elegy project. Maybe. Do you want to get into that?
Katherine Dowling (00:11:42):
Sure, I'd love to. Yeah. I love that that's a piece you were drawn to. This piece was a commission of mine written specifically for me and for this album. And it's based on a very beautiful poem by Helen Steiner Rice, an American poet. I won't recite the poem, it always makes me cry, pretty tear jerker. But it's about the process of loss and grief, and ultimately the dawn that always follows every nightfall or every dark experience. So when I was dreaming up this project, it was in 2021 summer and fall, and I was in the process of trying to get a grant and trying to choose which of Alice's pieces I would learn and just in those really early dreaming stages. And I reached out to Alice because of course, most importantly, I wanted her blessing before I pursued any of this. And she was so kind and so supportive.
(00:12:42):
And she said, if you pursue this project, I will write a new piece for you to be a special part of it. And then she asked me if there was any kind of theme or any kind of ideas that I was thinking about with respect to the project. And I said, well, there wasn't really, but I was working on this other project that you mentioned, my Elegy project around that time. And I said, it would be really interesting and special to have an elegy from you, because that's such a huge part of my artistic life at the moment. And she was excited by that. And in fact, it sparked her curiosity to start working on a requiem, which she is working on now. But the Elegy project is to tell you a little bit about that. That started during Covid when I think so many of us musicians, artists were searching for our way when we had all our work collapse.
(00:13:39):
And we were trying to find these ways not only to connect with listening communities, but also to stimulate our own creativity, our own creative drive. And we had a really dark time in my family. My sister-in-law passed away very suddenly in early 2021. And because of Covid restrictions, we were not able to mourn her as we would in other times. And then within about six months, my father-in-law passed away from Covid. So a big part of my grieving process personally was playing elegies, works of mourning at the piano. And I spent hours and hours doing that every day. And it kind of came to be part of a recital tour that I did following the end of, I won't say the end of Covid. We know it's not over, but the end of restrictions. And that was quite a powerful experience for me to connect with listeners because everyone goes through grief, right?
(00:14:45):
It's one of the kind of hallmarks of the human experience, and it was an incredibly potent and fresh time for grief during those months and years. So Alice's work, There is No Night Without a Dawning is an integral part of that program. I learned 100 elegies or more, but every program that I do is a slightly different combination, but Alice's work is always right in there because it does go into the depth of a kind of mourning experience. It's quite dark in terms of its expression, but ultimately through the work towards its conclusion, there is a sense of hope. Well, maybe I shouldn't say hope, but certainly of dawning of change just being constant and of the grief process changing. So that works always in there. And as you say, the music is quite thorny, quite difficult, but I think sometimes having a poem, for example, and a little bit of backstory for a piece such as what I've shared just now, that can offer a way, and I hope it can, anyway.
Leah Roseman (00:15:56):
Thank you for that.
(00:16:00):
You're about here an excerpt from There is No Night Without a Dawning from the album Awake and Dreaming.(Music)
(00:18:58):
You mentioned you learned a hundred elegies.
Katherine Dowling (00:19:01):
Yes.
Leah Roseman (00:19:02):
I know that you memorize all your solo music, and it's really astounding to me. I don't understand that kind of memory, and I'm curious about your process and the way you digest music.
Katherine Dowling (00:19:13):
Sure. Yeah. It is certainly not something I ever set out to do. And so I'm going to be someone who memorizes everything. The first most obvious reason for it and how it informs my process is that I have quite poor vision and I don't feel like I can trust my eyes. In addition to that, I'm not a strong reader. I think as far as all musicians go, I'm probably not bad. But compared to some pianists, I'm not on the stronger side of readers because that wasn't a big part of my training until relatively late. So I got used to, depending on my memory, more than on my vision. And part of that is I was trained in the Suzuki program to completion. So I think I was about 12 when I finished the sixth Suzuki book. And by then we're into Bach, partitas, Beethoven sonatas.
(00:20:08):
And I was doing that exclusively in the Suzuki system, so by ear. And I always have to give a bit of defense to that method in that in Japan where the method originates, children learn to read music at school. So it's not that the method doesn't believe reading is important, but in Saskatchewan public school, we did not learn how to read music. So I was really dependent on my memory and on my ears as a way of learning music from the very beginning. So with that kind of imprinted as how I learned music, I think that's a big part of how came to be, how I approach it. And as I play a lot of more contemporary music, also the scores I find, I don't want to say illegible, it's just that they're so intricate and so highly notated that there's simply no way that with my not ideal vision, my not ideal reading skills, there would just be no way for me to do it, were it not memorized.
(00:21:11):
And so as I learn a piece of music, I just am memorizing from the very beginning, memorizing my gesture once I find what it needs to be, and hearing the sound in my head and having that memorized, and then whatever gesture is required to realize that. So it is probably a slower learning process than somebody's learning process who is a strong reader, but it's just kind of how my way of learning music has evolved. I'm so blown away by so many of my pianist colleagues who can take an orchestral score and play it right away. A lot of pianists who work as vocal coaches, for example. But yeah, my particular skillset lends itself much better to that memory work.
Leah Roseman (00:21:59):
So do you have perfect pitch?
Katherine Dowling (00:22:00):
I do.
Leah Roseman (00:22:01):
Okay. So you're able to hear chords when you look at a score?
Katherine Dowling (00:22:05):
Not right away necessarily, but that's part of the work that I do in my practicing.
Leah Roseman (00:22:13):
I think I'd read somewhere that you'd done some investigation, I mean not your own research necessarily into the way we learn music from a neuroscience perspective.
Katherine Dowling (00:22:22):
And that's not in any kind of academic way. It's more just as a fan of, I find, well, it was sparked by actually a pianist who had her name's Christine McLeavey. I haven't seen her in years, but she did her master's at Julliard in piano and then went on to do a PhD at Stanford in neuroscience. And at the time, we were colleagues at the Banff center in their long-term residency program, which no longer exists. And she said, this is the most creative thing out there was neuro research that in any, she was obviously a very brilliant intellect and of anything she was aware of, and if anything she could think of, neuro research was the most creative. It was just totally at the cutting edge of human understanding. And that really sparked my curiosity. So Daniel Kahneman, the writer, that's someone whose work I've really enjoyed exploring, and I kind of got myself in a position where I had to keep learning more because I was teaching a pedagogy course at the university where I was teaching, and I really wanted, if I was going to be sharing how we teach or I really had to know how we learn and I didn't.
(00:23:35):
So it really sparked a lot of curiosity and really, I'm just such a fan of that branch of human study. I think it's really incredible.
Leah Roseman (00:23:46):
Yeah, there's so many directions this could go in. I was curious about pedagogy. You touched on Suzuki and a lot of many, many of my colleagues teach in the Suzuki method. They're very devoted. I did have, that was my first start, but I got away from it. And then as a teacher, many students have come to me as teenagers who were in the Suzuki method and just, yeah, that really could barely read music and weren't exposed to other styles of music. That's what really got me. It was very narrow because he developed this repertoire a long time ago. And I know a lot of teachers expand beyond that, and they have that flexibility. But just my experience was this was not the experience of the students, and especially, it's so important to expose, I shouldn't say children, all students, to music of now, of contemporary music.
Katherine Dowling (00:24:36):
Yeah, it's kind of ironic that that's such a big part of my career. And my first five, six years at the instrument was the opposite. And I think as teachers, we really do our students a disservice if we're a kind of fundamentalist about any method, right? Because there's never going to be a perfect method for any student, much less for all of them. And certainly I would not take a didactic approach and apply Suzuki method to a beginner student. That being said, a lot of strengths that I got from that training are the ears. And that's so easy to neglect in pianist training. So many young pianists now, they won't even have an acoustic piano at home. It'll be a digital instrument. And so right from the very beginning, that aspect of the training isn't there. And then what in 10 years are we going to expect them to hear colors and hear overtones when that has just never been part of it.
(00:25:36):
So I think in terms of a young pianist, that is a great strength of the method is you're opening up the ears and making them a priority from the very beginning, but certainly for the reasons you mentioned, and I'm sure many others as well, it can be really restrictive too. And I was absolutely one of those teenagers, maybe 12 or 13 preteen, and I went to my next teacher and the poor woman I couldn't really read, and she was super patient and other things too. I hadn't learned technique apart from repertoire. That was another huge curve. But she was really incredible to work with me through that. So yeah, there definitely are limitations.
Leah Roseman (00:26:20):
It's interesting what you were just touching on in terms of the electronic keyboards that a lot of people are using now and the overtones. I'd never thought about that, but of course,
Katherine Dowling (00:26:29):
Yeah. I mean, if you never have your piano in tune, that's not really going to be part of your experience. But yeah, the spectrum of sound is so narrow on a keyboard, and I mean, if you can only afford a keyboard or if you live in an apartment with neighbors, then you have to practice over headphones. I mean, I see so many reasons why it's the right choice for some families. But in terms of the aural development like A-U-R-A-L development, I think it's pretty tough. And also the touch feeling that escapement, the point of sound, obviously you can't do that even on a, they try to mimic it with some higher end keyboards, but it's just a completely different experience.
Leah Roseman (00:27:08):
Okay. You mentioned your Banff residencies, and I believe there you met Henk Guittart.
Katherine Dowling (00:27:16):
I did, yes. I met him. So he's a violist and conductor founder of the Schoenberg Ensemble and Schoenberg String Quartet, a Dutch musician. I met him first there in 2006, which feels like such a long time ago. And I suppose he was there as in the capacity of a mentor faculty, and I was very inexperienced and he was so incredibly encouraging and inspiring. I had many coachings with him. And then in 2007, so that was in the fall, and then in the winter, he was back in that capacity to the center, and we got to play together. He programmed to play a duo work with me. Ever since then, he's like a fairy godfather for me. Not only in that he's given me so many opportunities, but he's really been a foundational part of me finding my sound and finding my aesthetic and exploring the repertoire.
Leah Roseman (00:28:17):
And you are part of one of his ensembles in the Netherlands?
Katherine Dowling (00:28:21):
Yeah, Gruppo Montebello, which has been on hiatus for a bit now. But it is, I suppose, dedicated to all of Arnold Schoenberg's arrangements that he made for his society for private musical performance, which not only with the public vitriol he experienced for his music, he also lived in a time of extreme antisemitism. And any critique now that I see of his music from his time, you can also see it's very, very colored by prejudice. So he founded a society where none of the public was not welcome because the critics were not welcome. Assaults on his person were not welcome. And it was a safe space to not only explore his own music, but also works by Debussy and Bruckner and other contemporaries, Zemlinsky, who now we think of as, "Well, surely everyone would love that, right?" But of course, they were very controversial in their time as well. And so he made these arrangements. They had very little money. He couldn't have a whole symphony to play prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, but he could make an arrangement for a chamber ensemble. So Gruppo Montebello recorded and performed all of those arrangements as well as many of the Chamber works of Schoenberg himself and also Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and other contemporaries. So it was a really special project, brought together musicians from all over the world.
Leah Roseman (00:29:48):
And I believe the Elegy project we're speaking of earlier. You also brought that to the Netherlands last year?
Katherine Dowling (00:29:53):
I did, yes. I had a version of it. And The Hague, a colleague of mine, her name is Ellen Corver, I think she's probably objectively the best pianist I've ever heard, and I've heard so many amazing pianists. But she's just a really incredible artist. She has a new concert hall and series in The Hague, and it was a really great experience to bring a program there. It was works of Alice and also of Henri Dutilleux, French composer and of Rudolph Escher, a Dutch composer. So these works that were written towards the end of the second World War. And so it's really also this sense of dawning following great destruction and creativity as a response to destruction.
Leah Roseman (00:30:39):
Yeah. I'm curious, getting to know the Netherlands music scene a little bit, how their ecosystem is a little different than Canada, let's say. I've had some discussions with people there, and I have an artist daughter who lives there. She's based in Rotterdam. She's not a musician, but I'm sort of interested.
Katherine Dowling (00:30:56):
Sure, yeah. I've been so lucky to have amazing experiences there. I find, well, maybe in all of Europe, being a musician feels like more of a kind of normal thing. You could say, I'm a plumber, I'm a teacher, I'm a banker, I'm a musician. It's kind more part of life as of course, western classical music is a European art form in the Netherlands. I also feel though that there's quite an appetite for new music for 20th century art as just part of the ecosystem. One good example of that would be, I think it was 2017, and we were in a town called Heerlen, which is not a very big town, certainly not somewhere with a grand concert hall and a big upper class and a tradition of a really, what you might call an erudite public. And Ellen Corver, who I mentioned in her duo partners Sepp Grotenhuis, they performed a work by Stockhausen that's 75 minutes long with no breaks, involves non pianistic sounds, and the audience was in rapt attention the entire time. And they're brilliant artists. A huge part of that, of course, is because of them and then immediate standing ovation as soon as it was finished. And I've seen that experience, I've had that experience there as a performer that they seem to have very open ears in a lot of ways, and I've really valued those experiences.
Leah Roseman (00:32:31):
Wonderful. Actually sort of connected to the Netherlands, there's a piece on your album of Alice's music called Shade, which I believe was by a Van Gogh very famous painting, Starry Night.
Katherine Dowling (00:32:44):
Yeah. There are a number of visual art inspirations amongst Alice's. This one, Shade, it's quite shadowy and mysterious. And I think when I think of that very famous painting, I think of the stars on those yellowy orange tones against the kind of swirling blue. And Alice's work seems to me it does have those kind of scintillated moments like bright brightness, but it also is maybe more about the darkness of the sky from which the stars are sparkling, and it's quite almost jazzy and it's harmonic palette. I don't say that I know anything about jazz, but that's a response I've heard from some listeners that there's a kind of jazz sound to it. And that's the second work of a set of three. The first one is Cyclone, which is a very, very fast, turbulent, and then Shade. And then Blaze is the final of the three, and they make up a work called Musical Tableau all taken together. But then there's also Aeon, which is inspired by the famous surrealist melting clock work of Salvador Dali and the Weeping Woman, which is inspired by Pablo Picasso's famous set of anti-war paintings, also called the Weeping Woman.
Leah Roseman (00:34:15):
You're about to hear an excerpt of Shade from Awake and Dreaming.(Music)
(00:34:18):
Yeah, it's wonderful. All the connections between the arts. And I was reading actually a book my sister had given me last night. It's ekphrastic poetry, so it's poetry inspired from visual art.
Katherine Dowling (00:36:04):
Oh, fascinating.
Leah Roseman (00:36:05):
Yeah. You'd mentioned Cyclone. So you grew up on the prairies in Canada. You must have experienced or seen tornadoes or had that sort of
Katherine Dowling (00:36:14):
Yeah, absolutely. I don't think, not in the extreme way that our southern neighbors do at times, but we certainly have funnel clouds, tornadoes, the experience that would be most common. It would be in the heat of summer and it's incredibly dry. Get a prairie person talking about temperature and they'll tell you about the dry cold and the dry heat versus the damp, colder damp heat. So the height of summer, it's been very hot, very, very dry. And then the sky, it goes incredibly still. You can't even hear insects or birds, certainly no wind. And the wind is normally a kind of central part of the experience. And then the sky goes a funny color, maybe a kind of greeny color, and it could even go pitch black at nine o'clock in the morning, pitch black, and then the storm really starts to swirl and you can see it coming from a ways away because it's so flat. And we have that sight line and then the clouds start to take the form of this swirling tornado shape. And they do touch down, not always, and of course cause really significant destruction when they do, but you can see it and have the experience even when you're quite far away.
Leah Roseman (00:37:29):
This is Cyclone from Awake and Dreaming. (Music) Yeah. I am curious because you did return to Regina for quite a few years after having been away, and what was that like for you?
Katherine Dowling (00:41:22):
It was fascinating. As you say, I left after high school and I had lived mostly most of those years in New York City and Montreal, also a little bit in Toronto and Vancouver and several winters spent in Banff. I mean, everywhere is always changing. I went back to Saskatchewan, not with the intention of being there for a long time, but then we had initially moved there. It was a place that physically, geographically closest to my husband's family as his father was going through some health challenges at the time. We wanted to be closer. And then with Covid, I was super privileged to have an academic position open up at the university there. So we spent five years total and it, it was really fascinating. The city has changed so much from when I was growing up as cities are always changing, and of course the musical ecosystem had changed in so many ways, but it was my first real teaching experience and I'm very, very touched, and I don't want to say proud of because it's feels like kind of unfair, proprietary, but I'm very touched by the students I worked with there, and they really had a strong impact on me.
Leah Roseman (00:42:37):
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with: pianist and musicologist Samantha Ege, composer Frank Horvat, organist Gail Archer, Cheng2 Duo with Bryan and Silvie Cheng, and pianist Jeeyoon Kim. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the links to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend. Thanks.
(00:43:32):
What did you learn from them?
Katherine Dowling (00:43:33):
Oh my gosh, where to begin? My students there all had an incredible love for music and incredible curiosity, and none of them had a good access and for all various reasons, sometimes economic, well, all economic really, but also cultural, just a poverty of access, I would say. And so they had this kind of incredible curiosity and creativity and drive, and it was kind of scattered and fragmented. They hadn't had the opportunity to channel it where they really wanted it to go. I had the experience growing up of really amazing training. My teachers were phenomenal, and it was very natural for me to go away to keep training when I finished high school. And that was totally not the case for these students. Some of them had incredibly minimal formal training, but then to see a student who came to the audition playing maybe a RCM grade six or seven level piece and not playing it with a strong competency that then within a few years they're playing a Beethoven sonata and getting accepted to summer festivals alongside students who had had incredible training since age five. I really learned that the limitations on students are not real, whether they're self-imposed or imposed by the prejudice of a teacher may be known or unknown, they're illusory and they're really, it's the biggest disservice we can do as a teacher is to assume a limitation and a lack of access doesn't need to be a kind of period at the end of a sentence.
(00:45:20):
All the different directions those students' lives have gone, their journeys at the piano completely blew out of the water what I would've thought was possible.
Leah Roseman (00:45:30):
Wonderful. And in Toronto, now you're professor at York University, and you're also teaching through the Royal Conservatory, right? Their sort of teenager program. What's it called? The Taylor?
Katherine Dowling (00:45:39):
Yeah, the Taylor Academy. Taylor Academy. I'm on maternity leave from both at the moment. But yeah, I coach chamber music at the Taylor Academy, and that's really, really fun. And it's a wonderful program. They get quite a holistic education there. And the young people, it's so touching to me now. We get a lot of stories in the news. The young people, they're addicted to their phones or they have this horrible self-esteem, mental health challenges because of social media. And I believe all of that is true. It is a very hard time to be a young person, but then these young people, they take the subway after school on a Friday. Some of them leave early and they spend their whole Friday night playing chamber music with their friends and then whole day Saturday as well. And it's not only, I mean the work ethic is beautiful, but they're really, I think, bucking the trend of a lot of the modern adolescent experience. And it's really special how the conservatory and that program led by Jeanie Chung, a really phenomenal artist in person. It's really created a beautiful place for them to explore their art.
Leah Roseman (00:46:48):
Wonderful. So you're a new parent. How's that going?
Katherine Dowling (00:46:55):
It's everything as you know. It's beyond exhausting and also energizing in a new way I've never experienced, and my perception of time has completely contorted. My baby's four months old, and I feel like how could it have only been four months? It has been years since I was before I was pregnant, but at the same time, it's gone by so quickly. And so just living with all of these kind of new polarities of experience, but it's been really amazing.
Leah Roseman (00:47:32):
Yeah, it really changes things
Katherine Dowling (00:47:36):
To put it mildly. Yeah,
Leah Roseman (00:47:40):
I remember I played a chamber music concert when my first child was four months, and just feeling like in this fog,
Katherine Dowling (00:47:46):
Oh, for sure. I mean, take anyone and even without a baby to care for, if you're not sleeping more than a few hours a night, you're going to get in a fog to say nothing of all the other demands on our minds and bodies. Yeah, I did my first performance at, he was six weeks old to the day, and that was, I don't know why that seemed to me like a good idea, but he was backstage with his dad, and I was certainly foggy, but we made it through.
Leah Roseman (00:48:18):
Oh yeah. So I noticed you were a Tanglewood Fellow and you did your doctorate with Gilbert Kalish and I was a Tanglewood fellow, and I remember my coachings with Gilbert Kalish were very memorable, some contemporary chamber music, which was the first time I played that kind of music in a chamber music setting. And probably my last time for many years that I did do that. Yeah, I don't think now it maybe be things have changed, but certainly when I was a student, there wasn't any expectation or encouragement to play music of now.
Katherine Dowling (00:48:51):
Sure. Yeah. And I think that is still the case in so many places, even in a benign way, just because we have so much repertoire. It's violinists and pianist. But I love your Tanglewood alum too. Those were formative years for me. Gil was no longer teaching there when I was there, but I was his student during those same years.
(00:49:12):
And I took five years to do my doctorate with Gil. And I know this isn't common, but Gil teaches lessons every single week for his doctoral students. We need him. But it's very much a performance oriented program. It's not research oriented. A lot of doctoral programs, we don't do comprehensive exams or write thesis or anything like that. It's all performing days. And I remember my first week with Gil, he had three concerts on the go, and this is when he was in his late seventies. The first one was the Brahms piano quintet with the Emerson String Quartet, who are also faculty at Stony Brook. And so I thought he's just brilliant chamber musician, such a heavy work for the pianist. And then he was also playing Beethoven concertos at Cornell University. So then he's also this soloist very personal voice in this very standard repertoire. And then he was also premiering new works of George Crumb with percussion and voice in the city. And so he's also works with singers and composers in non-traditional chamber music setting. And that has just, it's such a model for me to be that omnivorous about the repertoire and about the art form. Yeah, I feel like I owe so much to Gil everything I could even say. He really, I feel like he gave me my sound, and he really presented such an incredible model for what a life at the piano can be.
Leah Roseman (00:50:45):
What's his teaching style in private lessons?
Katherine Dowling (00:50:47):
So what was so interesting is I have a tiny bit of insight into that because another pianist wanted to watch some of his teaching while I was a student there. And I remember this other pianist, he was a brilliant artist, but quite a new teacher. So he wanted to learn from Gil. And Gil said to him, well, the most important thing is for me to make the students think I really like them, which sounds like, wait, what do you mean? Could it really be that simple? But he really felt like a family member. And quite quickly too, I know that the whole studio felt that way. What's interesting looking back now is that was probably the only common element across all of his students, because we don't sound alike. We don't sound like him. Something about feeling honored and liked and safe enabled each of us to find our own sound and find ourselves as artists. So that's kind of the only thing about his teaching I can find as a common element.
Leah Roseman (00:51:58):
Did he introduce interesting repertoire to you that you hadn't known about?
Katherine Dowling (00:52:02):
He did. Yeah, certainly American repertoire, I would say. I knew of composers like Elliot Carter, but I hadn't kind of been exposed to a lot of his works. And of course, Gil had premiered so many of them. Also, Charles Ives, certainly I knew of Ives also, but I didn't have that deep knowledge. Like Gil, for example, was one of the first interpreters of the Concord Sonata, which is this really sprawling, highly virtuos piece, George Crumbs, and when he worked with directly for many, many years. And Crumb has of course, this very beautiful, intricate, handwritten notation, and it actually is pretty clear once you get into it. But Gil could just say, oh, that this is what he wants. Particularly in terms of extended techniques, and again, it was a name I knew. I had heard the incredible Black Angel string quartet, but I didn't know about this wealth of piano repertoire.
(00:53:03):
And then also, Gil is a very, I think, really special interpreter of Haydn and Schubert and all the kind of greatest hits, if you will, composers of piano repertoire. So really that egalitarian approach to the whole repertoire I think is also what I gained from him, the sense you don't have to choose to be a Beethoven performer or a George Crumb performer or a performer of your friends. He was also always playing music by the composition faculty at Stony Brook. And as a pianist, you do all of those things and you ought to be able to, and you ought to want to rather than saying, there's this one and this one.
Leah Roseman (00:53:49):
I'm curious at Tanglewood, did you play in the orchestra at all or was it strictly chamber music?
Katherine Dowling (00:53:53):
It was such a great program because we had to do everything, which was of course terrifying that first time. But we had to play solo, we had to play chamber, we had to play art song with singers. We also had to do some opera reduction and we had to play in orchestra, and we had to play in the festival of contemporary music. So some of the orchestral works. I think my first year, well, I had Pines of Rome, the celesta part there, and Prokoviev Romeo and Juliet, which is quite a big piano part. Petruchka, I think that was my second year. So the repertoire I think was chosen so that all the eight or 10, however many piano fellows, we would have some of those really meaty standard orchestral excerpts, which is thrilling for a pianist. We don't get much experience to do that.
Leah Roseman (00:54:51):
I mean, we have a couple of wonderful pianists who play regularly with the National Arts Centre Orchestra where I play, and it's such a different skill. I always curious to know, very few pianists end up doing it 'cause it's very specific.
Katherine Dowling (00:55:05):
Absolutely. And I think also the opportunity is really quite rare. Most orchestras don't even have a full-time pianist, so I think people, freelancers might fall into that as a career, but it's not really a path one could hope and intend to pursue because the opportunity might just not be there. But yeah, certainly not only playing with a conductor, obviously that is a whole separate skillset, but being able to direct your sound from the back of the stage when you have maybe timpani and low brass beside you or something, or playing the other keyboard instruments like the celesta, that is a very, very specific and counterintuitive way of producing sound. And to actually get the sound to speak and bloom and then do something musical with it, it is absolutely a separate additional set of skills, let's say.
Leah Roseman (00:55:59):
And was it surprising to you to be part of so much sound the first time you did it?
Katherine Dowling (00:56:04):
That's a great question. I had played in orchestra in my undergrad, so it wasn't that I had never done it, but certainly being in that specific physical location and hearing what the orchestra sounded like from there was very shocking. And then certainly, it's so different like your point of place in the orchestra from what you might hear when you listen to a recording of the piece or if you were in the hall just as an audience member. And that's a huge learning curve too, that you can't actually trust your ears. That would be too late and it would not actually be accurate to what the sound is like.
Leah Roseman (00:56:45):
Well, I wanted to ask about the physicality and ergonomics of playing. Certainly if anyone's, I haven't actually, I missed your performance in Ottawa last year. I was out of town. But the videos I've seen of you playing really embodied way of approaching the instrument, was that from Gil or other teachers or your own development?
Katherine Dowling (00:57:03):
Probably mostly from Gil. He is also a physically small person. I am almost five foot one. And so I think I believed for a long time I couldn't be a powerful player. And certainly the really virtuoso romantic repertoire, let's say, was off limits to me. And I don't know that that was just a self-imposed limitation. I think there's, even within piano pedagogy, there's a lot of stereotype of what kind of person can play what kind of repertoire. And then it was certainly with Gil and actually with a teacher named Mark Durand, who I formerly professor at University of Montreal, who I worked with at some summer programs before I was working with Gil, who really helped me to understand how sound is produced at the instrument. And it's nothing to do with force or strength at all. It's to do with speed of attack. And if you think of, I dunno, hockey, the great players aren't necessarily the biggest ones.
(00:58:10):
They might be the fastest ones. So there's these different ways of being virtuoso, but I mean, it really is just physics, kinetic energy. The motion is converted into sound. And once I came to not only understand that and know that intellectually, but to understand what that meant for my playing, that totally changed everything. And so I think sometimes we look at a pianist and it looks like maybe they're moving a lot or maybe they're not moving a lot, or they're moving in a way that looks awkward or they're moving in a way that looks dance-like, and we really can't know exactly what's going on. We just get a kind of visual. But that point of sound, all of our motion is to do with the speed of attack at that point of sound. And of course, all of our bodies are different. All of our physicality are different, so it's going to look different on different people.
(00:59:10):
But that certainly is every motion I make is to do with that speed of attack. And of course, we have many notes. It's not just everyone speed of attack, it's the process of all of them and connecting that to the sound that we want to hear, the sound we think the composer is after. And so it's kind of a process of constant discovery because each piano is different and our bodies are always changing as we get older, our sense of ourselves in his space. But yeah, all the motion really does just come down to that speed of attack.
Leah Roseman (00:59:46):
That's super interesting. Actually, let's talk about different pianos because you've toured quite a bit. How do you deal with that?
Katherine Dowling (00:59:55):
My teacher, when I was a youth, she told me once, never fight the piano because it will always win. I was going to play in a competition in Saskatoon, and so I had to drive there, and it was about 16, it's called the Lyell Gustin Competition, and it seemed like a very big deal to me at the time. So I had to drive there two and a half hours and then kind of wait around and then go play my whole program, which was I think a Bach prelude and Sonata, a Chopin scherzo and a contemporary piece. Well, it was Lowell Liebermann, which at the time felt very edgy to me. And so no space to warm up. I'm sure I played my program before we got on the road, but then my mother and I drove up to Saskatoon. She doesn't drive. So I was driving.
(01:00:42):
And in a situation like that, it is just your mind. You have to have all the music there, and you have to be so present in the moment. You have to experience what the instrument is capable of. Try to figure that out as you go. And then that great wisdom, don't try to fight it, don't try to force something, but discover what the instrument can do. And that's what I try to do, of course, to greater and lesser degrees of success. Certainly we can see a lot of class barriers in piano playing because let's imagine someone had a nine foot Steinway from their first piano lesson. When they go to compete, let's say, or audition on a nine foot Steinway, they've always been playing with a reasonably similar palette of colors. The one note, a great artist, might be able to make a hundred different sounds with that one note.
(01:01:39):
And if you've always had that at your disposal, while you're very familiar with that capability, whereas if you have had an upright piano like a Nordheimer or something, not to criticize that brand, but it's designed for a much more intimate sound, and then you suddenly have this nine foot instrument, you're not instantly going to be able to access those 100 colors on every note. So there is certainly inequality, and we see that play out in the profession for sure. But the positive, I guess, is that it's always a discovery. Every concert hall space, you have this new friend, this new piano and try to treat it that way, not like a new foe.
Leah Roseman (01:02:27):
Yeah. Well, I was curious about creating performance opportunities.
Katherine Dowling (01:02:31):
Still going to of a mystery to me. I think obviously in an ideal world, we would just be invited and people would know who we are and they would want to engage us, and they would understand that their listening community could connect well with us. Of course, I don't know that that's the case for anyone. There's a great story anecdotally that the great pianist, Yem Broman, that his family always are encouraging him to take a break, take a rest, but even at such a great stage of his career, he feels like he has to keep hustling all of the time. And so I don't know that there's, we never really get to escape creating opportunities. And I really believe as artists, our role is not to meet a demand. Our role is not to say, oh, I think this is what people want. I'm going to show them that that's me.
(01:03:26):
But it's really to create a demand and to cultivate a demand for what we do, because I think that the hunger appetite for artistic experiences is everywhere. And it's more just that connecting the dots process. And I think as artists, certainly in this day and age, we have to take responsibility for that and take ownership. I think that's really hard. I don't know how, I haven't found a formula for doing it successfully 100% of the time, but I do believe I have to be an advocate for our art form. I think it's the only way, at least for me and I, sometimes it's easier, easier than other times. If you have good support or if you get those little breaks of luck and you have someone with more power or access helping you or believing in you, certainly then you're not advocating alone. But I do think that is part of my responsibility to advocate for what I do, and that's where the opportunities come from.
Leah Roseman (01:04:31):
Have you done concerts in different kinds of settings that were kind of inspiring?
Katherine Dowling (01:04:35):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think the term community engagement, I don't like it because I think it's always a community regardless of the setting and in a really traditional standard concert hall environment that is a community, right? And I don't know what else it would be, but certainly some of the maybe less expected listening communities that I've had the privilege of performing for would include refugee resettlement homes. That was a really amazing experience. I had with Kerry DuWors, one of my duo partners, she's a violinist based in Manitoba. We were on a tour with a Prairie Debut touring organization, and there were two settlement homes for newly arrived refugees to the Calgary area. And we shared some music with those communities, and that was really, really powerful. Kerry herself is a descendant of refugees first generation, so I can't speak to her experience, but it was extremely powerful for her.
(01:05:48):
And certainly to engage with a community of people with whom we most likely would not have met in that standard concert hall environment was very special. And to be sharing music in their home, this was their new living space. And to not have the expectation that they would leave their home and seek out classical music, but that we were invited to where they were living to their new home and that we could share music. There was very powerful. Certainly care homes for the elderly, that's community to speak broadly. That's a community with whom I've really had incredible experiences sharing music on that same tour. Actually, I think we were in High River Alberta and we were playing in many small towns. The hospital will also have a extended care hospice and retirement community all within the one building. So we were playing music for the residents who lived there but weren't necessarily hospital patients, but they were living at that center.
(01:06:59):
One woman who was no longer verbal as I was playing, and it was Brahms, I think Opus one 18 with these beautiful set of six pieces. And she wheeled herself up, and then she was right next to me, and she was humming along with everything and this beautiful low, very resonant sound. And I don't know if that was, the piano was familiar to her or the repertoire or the vibration on her body. I couldn't ask her. Well, I could, but she couldn't share with me exactly what was happening for her. But yeah, I'll have that sound in my ears until I die, I'm sure. So those would just be a couple, but it's always a relationship with whomever is listening in my view.
Leah Roseman (01:07:48):
Yeah. I'm curious, do you improvise and do you compose?
Katherine Dowling (01:07:53):
Oh, I wish. And I wish I have had a number of pieces come across my music desk that say optional improvisation and then a set of 20 bars or something. I never take the option. I have so much admiration for artists who do, and of course a great number of contemporary are very much at home improvising. I feel wholly unqualified and incapable. It's not an ego thing, it's not that I'm worried about not sounding good, but I just feel like it's not part of my practice. But I have immense admiration for it. My husband is also a pianist, and he grew up with a lot of fiddling tradition. And improvisation for him is like second nature. And I think it's really amazing what improvisers do. And composition, same story. I really bow down to composers and it's something I have never dipped my toes into, and I doubt I ever will. I love it. I admire it, and it's not my wheelhouse.
Leah Roseman (01:09:05):
You're young. I won't be surprised if you, well, I, you're playing sounds very improvisatory to me. That's why I was wondering.
Katherine Dowling (01:09:14):
That really means so much to me. Thank you for saying that. Alice's notation is highly intricate and specific, but then very oftentimes, probably the majority of the time, her intended effect is actually quite free. That really means to me that I've internalized her language to the extent that I can get that freedom.
Leah Roseman (01:09:36):
And just to dig into your process a little more, I'm curious, are you journaling? Are you writing things down with your practicing?
Katherine Dowling (01:09:43):
Not the way I tell my students to. I write every morning three pages from a method called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, maybe you're familiar with it. I've been doing that for many years now. That often touches on my practicing of the previous day. I also like to work when it's my most efficient work. I work in 25 minute cycles. The Pomodoro technique, if anyone's familiar, it's meant to be the amount of time that the average adult brain can stay in a focused mode before needing a kind of five to 10 minute mind wandering diffuse mode. So I usually work that way and then cycle through those 25 minutes, then five to 10 minutes off. And so sometimes within those focused sets, I actually can't hold the focus. And other times I feel like, oh, I could sustain this longer, but I know my mind enough to know it's not going to be most efficient if I try to keep going. So that would be the kind of when I'm doing my best work, that would be the kind of method that I employ. I don't tend to journal right away after I probably could do with that. I often encourage my students right after a lesson, at least write down what your experience was, better yet go practice it right away so that it stays really fresh and present for you.
Leah Roseman (01:11:17):
What do you do for those five to 10 minute balancing breaks? What's effective?
Katherine Dowling (01:11:22):
My understanding is that it has to be letting your mind wander. So most ideal is meditation. Just sit or lie down and don't do anything. Just breathe. I don't necessarily always have the discipline for that, but certainly nothing like go on your phone or read the news, nothing like that. I tend to do some kind of physical movement, like get up from the piano, maybe go flip the laundry or get something ready for lunch. But usually I try to something that involves no mental effort. So it's an actual mind wandering time.
Leah Roseman (01:12:05):
So to wrap this up, I thought it might be interesting to reflect a little bit on mentorship because we did talk about Gil and how he meant so much, and you talked about his varied career and you also have this varied career. And what kind of things do you impart to your students or would you have said to 12-year-old Katherine about your future
Katherine Dowling (01:12:24):
Possibilities? Wow, that's really beautiful. To my 12-year-old self. I mean, I feel like it would be pointless because she wouldn't believe it. She wouldn't believe it, for sure. It would be too unbelievable. For my own students, I really actually try to not advise. I feel like they're living in a world, they're inheriting a world that I actually don't really understand anymore. It's so different. Even from when I was in their stage of life. There are so many things they already know more than I do. They understand differently. I don't know that there's necessarily that much that I can offer of guidance because the lives they're going to live in this profession and outside of it, they're going to be more experts than me. But certainly when it comes to their practicing, I really want them to feel at home at the piano. I want them to feel like when they're practicing that is for them.
(01:13:23):
I want them to feel safe, nurtured that that is a really positive part of their life. If they want it, they may wish to leave it behind entirely, but I think that's probably the most powerful thing I can offer them is helping them to be at home with the instrument and to be at home in their practicing. And the other thing that I really hope they understand, it took me a really long time to understand, and I still struggle with it all the time, is that this is for you, this music, it's for you. I think a lot of young people, certainly myself, we see ourselves outside. There's this profession of pianism, of western art music, and if we pass a litmus test, we might be granted admission by some gatekeepers. And I don't think that's entirely unfounded, but I don't think that's what the music or the instrument is all about. So to help them to embrace, embrace their artistry, embrace the repertoire, to know that it's very much for them, that they don't need to wait for someone to come and say, you're now good enough to be a part of this. That even if professionally it does feel that way, the real truth at the bones of the blood and guts of the matter is this is for all of us.
Leah Roseman (01:14:49):
Beautiful. Thanks for that. Well, thanks so much for speaking with me today. It was really inspiring.
Katherine Dowling (01:14:55):
Oh, it was really my privilege. Thank you so much, Leah.
Leah Roseman (01:14:59):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
