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Is the Piano Dying? Dame Fanny Waterman Thinks the End of Classic Piano Playing Is Coming

Dame Fanny Waterman, a world-renowned British music teacher, has said that she fears for the future of piano playing and that Britain is failing to produce performers internationally. So is she right: Is the piano really dying?Waterman, 94, spoke to the "Guardian" after announcing last week that she would stand down next year as chairwoman and artistic director of the Leeds International Piano Competition, one of the world’s most prestigious music competitions, which she co-founded in 1961.During the interview, she spoke about the future of piano in Britain. Waterman blames the popularity of electric keyboards and children starting to learn the piano at a later age in the U.K. than in other parts of the world for the piano’s demise.“The [future of the] piano is the cause of great worry for all us who love it,” she said. “First, lots of children are learning it from the electric piano. A waste of time, because you don’t get the speed of the key descent, you don’t get the different sounds.”
By Jaime Prisco

  • Universal Music Classic and Deutsche Grammophon Release Mohammed Fairouz Album Titled 'Follow, Poet'

    Universal Music Classics will release a new album on the Deutsche Grammophon imprint of work by Mohammed Fairouz titled "Follow, Poet," Jan. 27. The album marks the composer’s debut on the Yellow label, and the first release in the Universal Music Classic’s Return to Language series.The Return to Language series was created by Universal Music Classics President/CEO Elizabeth Sobol, a lifelong lover of literature. Sobol says it was only natural that the series be launched with Fairouz’s album."There is a deep humanity and civic devotion to Mohammed’s music," she says. "For him, music isn’t an abstract art — it has a higher purpose.”The musical works on this album, "Audenesque" and "Sadat," each exalt the transformative power of language through different means: one poetic, one oratorical. In "Audenesque," Fairouz sets verse by the great 20th-century English poet W.H. Auden and late Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney. With "Sadat," the composer evokes in an instrumental work the stirring life-story of slain Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
    By Jaime Prisco

  • Italian Director Monte Bettolgi Uses Marble Quarry Sounds for New Techno-Opera 'Il Capo'

    The intricate art of extracting sounds from the environment and using them for composition is its own work of art. And for a recent spot at Aeon Video, the techno-opera "Il Capo," of marble being extracted from an Italian quarry is a new idea in the face of opera and composition.It is not the first installation of field recordings but the idea is original. With the epic and destructive sounds of marble being harvested from a quarry, the idea of making it a musical composition is astounding.Just like a score for a movie from the likes of Johnny Greenwood, it is like an orchestra all its own, with the crashing sounds of marble that emulates something sinister just like the breaking of Arctic ice.The film depicts quarrymen working on the Monte Bettolgi in the Carrara region of the Apuan Alps in northwest Italy. The Italian director, Yuri Ancarani, followed a marble quarry boss as he led his men through tedious work and using a silent language of hand gestures to complete the dig.
    By Ian Holubiak