Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Ben Laude, Professor of Music (Piano Literature & Aural Skills) at Utah State University

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Ben Laude, a concert pianist and music educator, joins Behind the Tech to discuss his journey from a suburban childhood in Austin, Texas to becoming a world-renowned classical pianist and YouTube creator. Ben shares his early inspirations—including his father's dabbling in piano and his own private obsession with classical music that began in high school—and discusses the importance of having a good teacher and the role of the early Internet in fueling his passion for piano.  In this episode, Kevin and Ben explore the impact of AI on art and artists, the significance of classical piano in Ben's life and his efforts to popularize classical piano through educational content. They discuss the challenges and rewards of pursuing a career in music, the magic of bringing encoded scores (musical notations that serve as instructions for how to perform the music) to life, and the importance of community and feedback in achieving success.  Ben Laude | Utah State University  Kevin Scott    Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott    Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.    

Maybe one day we will be sort of comparing Horowitz and Pariah's Chopin Ballade to AI's different version of it and we can input, well, I want to hear an AI sort of play it with this kind of expression. Is that coming? Should we be concerned or what do you think? Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer and EVP of AI at Microsoft. Today, tech is a part of nearly every aspect of our lives. We're in the early days of an AI revolution promising to transform our lived experiences as much as any technology ever has. On this podcast, we'll talk with the folks behind the technology and explore the motivations, passion, and curiosity driving them to create the tech shaping our world. Let's get started. Hello, and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm co-host Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub.

And I'm Kevin Scott. Now, before we introduce our guest, we wanted to take a minute to share with you all that we are planning an Ask Me Anything or AMA episode with Kevin in the coming months. Yeah, that's right. We would love to hear your questions on any topic at all, from AI to sci-fi to woodworking or my latest obsession, which is pottery. So funny enough, as we are recording this, I have a kiln heating up to many thousands of degrees Fahrenheit right now firing pottery. Or we can talk about piano, which is the episode that we're recording today. So anything that's on your mind, please feel free to reach out to us and like we will try to give good answers to your good

questions. Yeah, absolutely. I'm really, really excited to see what questions come in. If you have a question for Kevin, you can send us an e-mail or voice note to BehindTheTechAtMicrosoft.com. That's BehindTheTechAtMicrosoft.com. Please include your name and a way to reach out if you have follow-up questions. Please keep voice notes to no longer than 90 seconds. Once again, that email is behindthetech at microsoft.com.

Awesome. I'm really looking forward to that. Me too. Okay, now we can dive into our interview for today, which I'm really looking forward to. So our guest today is a musician. Ben Lahti is a concert pianist who has performed all over the world. And he's also a longtime music educator, both in traditional education settings and as a YouTube creator. Yeah, look, I don't know whether I'm breaking news here, but I tend to get obsessed about like very particular things. And like one of the things that I've been obsessed about

since I was a teenager is classical piano. So I'm just super excited in general to talk to Ben because I think he's making some of the best educational content about classical piano anywhere in the world. And it's just sort of a miracle that these resources are available for folks who happen to have this particular obsession. But, you know, I think it's actually more relevant even than, you know, satisfying my desire to have a conversation with a fellow piano nerd. Because we're at this point in time where people are thinking a lot about what AI means for art and artists. And I think that there is a bunch of stuff that we can chat about with Ben to try to

get a little clearer in our head about what maybe things like AI are going to mean for art. about you know what maybe things like ai are going to mean for art um and you know it's sort of a hard conversation to have in general because i think if you ask 100 artists to define what art is like you would get 100 different definitions uh and so like you know but it is one of the most essentially human things uh that we have as a species is like the art that we make for ourselves and for each other. And so I'm like really excited to have this conversation with Ben, given that he's thought so critically about what makes the performance of classical piano like a compelling thing. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm really, really looking forward to this conversation.

So let's go over to Ben. Ben Laude is an adjunct professor of music, piano literature and oral skills at Utah State University and a YouTube creator devoted to popularizing classical piano content. He's an accomplished concert pianist whose playing has been described by The New York Times as superb in pace, tone, and eloquence. He was the head of the ToneBase piano platform for four years, and he's currently working on a video and podcast series exploring the work of composer Frederick Chopin and his relevance to the 21st century. Ben holds degrees in piano performance from Rice University and the Juilliard School. Ben, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. I've been really looking forward to this one. Thanks, Kevin. Likewise. So, you know, we always start these conversations by going back to, you know, people's beginnings. So you're obviously, you know, an amazing piano and music educator and a performer. How did you get onto that journey? Like,

when did you know that this is what you wanted to do? Well, unlike some of my peers in the classical music world, I didn't come from a strictly musical family. So there was music in my family, though. My dad is kind of dabbled at the piano, but he himself is a chemistry professor and administrator at UT Austin. So I grew up in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, you know, middle class and parents split up. But, you know, basically I had a normal, normal sort of 1990s childhood, early internet, lots of TV, sports, and a little bit of Chopin and Beethoven started filling the air around me at night. My dad would come home from his lab and try his hand at the beginning of Chopin's First Nocturne.

And so this intoxicating melody just sort of, I guess, seeped into my nervous system. Reportedly, I don't remember this exactly. Reportedly, I would come and stare at my dad when he would try to play. And eventually, I think it was pretty clear I needed to start piano lessons around age five. But in terms of how I ended up here, I mean, lots of people take piano lessons. But like I usually say, you're supposed to quit around age 11 or 12. You're not supposed to keep doing it. That's weird. Yeah. So I, I got really lucky, or you could say unlucky, depending on whether you think a career in music is a is a good idea. But I got really lucky. And right around high school, I got a new teacher who actually set my technique straight. You know, I had, I had maybe some talent before, but it wasn't really realized. Again, I had a lot of other priorities, I wasn't really realized again i had a lot of other priorities i wasn't being pushed to become some kind of virtuoso so uh there was a turning point around eighth or ninth grade i was starting to feel something for the music you know yeah in fact it was a chopin prelude i remember listening to in the eighth grade um suddenly and again this is right around early

puberty right so hormones are starting so one of the many things that happened in early puberty was this music started to matter to me. I felt something new and different and not exactly something I wanted to go brag to my friends about at school. So it became this private obsession. And I just became a ravenous collector of music scores and piano recordings. And I wanted to get better. I started practicing more. And I went from playing with flat fingers and barely making my way through a Bach invention in middle school to playing Cessas or Rachmaninoff concertos by my sophomore, junior year of

high school. So there was this kind of great leap that happened that was also happening at the same time that my interest in the art form was being stimulated. And so I was lucky to have a father and a mother who were encouraging when I told them I want to be a pianist. I want to go study this in college. So that's how it all got started in a nutshell. So how important do you think that feedback loop is to people like getting escape velocity into a profession? So like what you described that you started, you had a new teacher, you know, like I sort of wonder how important the internet, you know, was to like, finding community to fuel your obsession. But like, you know, it sounds like the important

thing is like this sort of feedback loop, where all of a sudden, like, you just started progressing faster, and like feeling better, and, you know, differently about the things that you were doing. Like, I felt the same way when I was young about programming. I've got a daughter right now who's 16 who's in the feedback loop for the biosciences. And it's just kind of cool to see that hit someone. Nothing has ever made me feel the way Chopin nocturnes and Polonaises and Beethoven sonatas, you know,

made me feel a Rachmaninoff concertos started to make me feel at high school. I don't know how to describe it. I don't feel the way I now that I felt that I wish I could go back and experience that magic again. But it's, you know, I feel like the world's been a bit disenchanted for me uh as as i grow older and so maybe some of my videos are an attempt to re-enchant things for myself too you know uh yeah but at the time i mean this i just started become i always had obsessions as a kid i would become fixated on some aspect of culture or or subject and piano piano in a way was just another one of those. But because it was so much deeper than, say, my obsession with yo-yos or juggling, no offense to those performing arts, but piano is a rich history and legacy, and it's just infinitely deep. And I was also just fascinated by the fact

that these encoded scores could be manifest in sound. You know, if that makes any sense, it's like some guy wrote this down 200 years ago in hieroglyphics and I'm able to decipher it and then bring it to life. I mean, it was just, that was magical to me. That was really cool to me. And so this obsession just,

I think because I got a good teacher, that teacher was able to push me and develop it. It could have just been another passing phase or fad for me, but something clicked and it really, and it's all I cared about for a bit there. So I'm just sort of curious, like you and one of your videos, you know, you're like holding up video cassettes of, you know, like the, you know, Horowitz last romantic and, you know, like you're talking about the 78 performance of, you know, the, you know, rack 3 that he did.

I had a whole bunch of those reference points when I was a kid. I think I'm a reasonable bit older than you are. And so growing up in the 70s and 80s, I got connected to classical music because Horowitz was a little bit of a celebrity. Not a huge celebrity of a celebrity, like not a huge celebrity, like mainstream wise, but like, yeah, he had done this televised concert from Carnegie Hall in 1968 that like, you know, was before I was born, but like got replayed.

And then I remember he did this interview on 60 Minutes, like, I believe, right when he was about to do his tour of Moscow. And like, there was a little bit of this sort of Cold War dimension where, you know, it's like, air pianists are better than your pianist at that point in time. And it was just enough to get me super fascinated, you know, by this, which, you know, was just as weird for me to be fascinated as it probably was for you. I was the only kid in my circle who was listening to Vladimir Horowitz and Vladimir Ashkenazi and Van Cliburn, Martha Argerich CDs or cassette tapes even before CDs existed. How did you find community? It sounds like you had good teachers,

but was there anything else? Because this is one of the things I think you're doing an extraordinary job of is giving these resources for people who have this fascination. Yeah. In a way, I'm just creating videos for my younger self that I wish had existed back then. But yeah, I probably wouldn't be here without so around then, I was probably playing video games with my brother, and we would get online and look up internet, you know,

sort of Resident Evil cheat codes for PlayStation, things like that. But message boards were sort of the main, at least for me, thing to do on the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s. And it was around 2000 that I developed this piano obsession. And so, of course, I developed this piano obsession. And so of course,

I ran to, to get online, dial up and look for some somebody saying something about piano. And I found it, I found there's an old site called the Chopin files that went when I was in high school, then it became defunct. And then I found a couple other sites. One's called Piano World and Piano Street. They still exist. So I went on there and just started talking a bunch of smack about piano because I was developing opinions. And I would hear somebody, you know, I heard somebody else claim that Horowitz's 1951 Rock Mononaut Thirt Concerto is obviously superior to his earlier and later renditions. And Martha Argerich's Rock III is too indulgent here. And so, of course, they're all received. They weren't my own opinions that I was kind of trying on different thought, you know.

But I asserted myself with confidence. And I found message boards to have these kinds of fun debates and, you know, ranking the Chopin etudes to see what was hardest. But, yeah, I needed that. Which one do you think is the hardest? Well, I mean, I think it's personal. But for me, it's either the double thirds etude or the opus 10 number two in A minor, where you have to, in your third, fourth and fifth fingers, play a rapid chromatic scale while also accompany yourself. Basically an oom-pah-pah in the same hand as this insane spidery thing.

So at the time, I couldn't touch these pieces. I was still getting better, and I was in awe of those who could, and I wanted to find everybody I could who had the same fascination for me. And without the internet, I wouldn't have done that. And also without video. In my pre-YouTube era, when the internet was helping to stimulate this interest, I had to find, I needed to watch these things. And I could listen because I could go to Barnes and Noble to the CD section and sort of buy some, even Tower Records was around back then. I could buy some

classical CDs and I would collect them with whatever, you know, a little bit of money that I had in high school. That's what I splurged it all on was just CDs and scores, but I wanted to watch these things. And I was lucky enough to catch something on PBS at some point about Evgeny Kissin. And I remember my, my teacher had a couple of VHS tapes that he let me borrow and one of, and a DVD. And one of them was a documentary called the art of piano, which chronicled all the famous pianists of the 20th century and that was the first time i heard of people like arau horowitz cirkin gould um and some of the earlier gold it's the first time i ever heard of chifra right yeah like it's unbelievable and then but also to see it was a big deal like to and there was something uh there was an aura around these old videos and now you now they're

all everything is on youtube i mean every every day i get recommended a new you know i mean it's not video but a new carnegie hall recital from from horowitz in the 40s i mean he played there like probably a handful of times every year there's dozens of these things that exist but as a kid just to have one record live recording of Horrocks from Carnegie Hall would make me flip out. So I really needed the internet and I needed video. And a couple of years before YouTube, I mean, YouTube was such a game changer for this obsession. And it was like it came right at the time I was in college when my obsession was peaking. But in the years before that, I found random websites.

One was called rareclassicaldvds.com and i i needed it in particular because i wanted to get my hands on a particular horowitz performance that apparently was a total bust in tokyo he was you know mixing medications and he just completely but i was fascinated by the fact that horowitz you know screwed up i was like i have to hear yeah this performance so um you know but i was fascinated by the fact that horowitz you know screwed up i was like i have to hear yeah this performance so um you know but i also ordered the before it was available i ordered some you know some horowitz in moscow you know dvds like that so i had this obsession again nobody except my piano teacher maybe in his younger years cared about this there was no

actually nowhere i could find anyone I wasn't going to school and trying to convince people to like this thing I liked. I played on the basketball team. Again, I was just kind of whatever. It was something I tried to hide, to be honest. And so, yeah, the internet was a place for me to go and find a community of like-minded people. And actually, it was amazing. When I started my channel, I got a sort of early Patreon supporter. And the guy reached out, and he's some kind of business or finance guy about around my age. And he said, hey, I remember you from the piano forums in the 2000s. I was all con 88. And I was like, I remember that. So these people I met at the time with these pseudonyms

are coming back into my life now and and finding my work you know so it's sort of coming full circle i suppose so how did you you know you you if you're playing uh you know playing rechmanoff concertos when you're in high school like you're you know super talented uh um yeah it sounds sounds like you had like all the passion that you need to decide to go to school to study like how did you how did you think about this as a career was were you just purely driven by the passion for this thing or did you have like these rational thoughts about you know like okay this is this is this is what the odds are of like, you know, being, uh, you know, a concert pianist, uh, like in this world. For better or worse, my, my dad raised me with,

um, a sort of almost American dream kind of mentality of, you know, you can be whatever you want to be in this country. And while I don't think that's exactly as true as maybe he was making it seem it i was lucky that um you know he he thought that and and so but for also for that reason i had no rational calculus at all i mean i it was it was it was a matter of first getting a taste of the fact that this does go on in the real world remember i'd only been on the internet so before i was going to commit to my this commit uh myself to this, I had to meet people actually doing it. And so luckily, between my junior and senior year of high school, I went to New Orleans Piano Institute camp, there's a competition that happens at the

same time. And I went there and it was like, me and a couple other sort of high school age people, but a lot of college age students, a couple years years older than me who are studying piano in college. And I felt, you know, I felt like I was on their level or at least near their level. And I, I loved it. I finally could just sort of like talk about my passion and my hobby and share it with them and go to international competition every night and watch amazing pianists, maybe five, 10 years older than me, uh, do their thing. And so that made it real. I mean, that's when I was like, okay, people, you can do this. It's there is a major in college. You could major in music. You can even major in piano. I still find it totally bizarre. Um, that, that that's, that that's a thing. Uh, and yet, you know, um, the moment that I, the moment that

it became real to me, I, I think it was just instant. And I was like, this is what I'm doing. And college again, was it was some, it was sold as a time to explore. I mean, it was a time to not have to decide. And so even though music majors are the ones at Rice where I went, who had to commit, we actually had to declare our major before we got there. Everybody else got a year or a year and a half or so. We were the ones who knew it. At the same time, there was this feeling of like, well, you know, I could always change my course. I was interested in math and other things. I even got into Northwestern for a double degree in math and music and ended up going to Rice. And so I knew I had other interests and skills and could always turn, but, um, I wasn't really thinking about

that. I was just so happy that this, uh, this career path existed. And I was so at the beginning of it that I wasn't thinking longer term. Yeah. It's, it's super, it's a super interesting, uh, profession and a practice. So like someone asked me one time, um, I was on a, it was actually at a computer science conference, uh, with, uh, you know, fellow PhD students. And like, we, we were in Vancouver and I went to like some Virgin records in Vancouver and like, I actually found, uh, like the art of piano, like that DVD there. And I like bought it. And they were like, why are you so fascinated with piano? Like you're a computer scientist. And I was like, I like there's some part of it. I can't explain it all. Like I just I have no idea. But like part of it is like

I love this idea that pianists and programmers like share this struggle that they have where you've got this machine that doesn't really want to do what you want it to do uh that you have to sit down at and conquer i mean like you just have to figure out its complexities and figure out how to extract out of it like you know what you have in your head. And like, it's a little bit of a solitary activity, like, you know, that, that act of, you know, mastering this tool, like no one can do for you. And like, there, there are very few shortcuts for accelerating it. Like you just got to put the hours in. And I always like, and like, I even heard, I think on the last romantic, one of these Horowitz VHS tapes that I watched, like Horowitz's manager described it. He was like, yeah, you know, pianists have, you know, sometimes can have this strange psyche because what they do is a solitary activity

like they sit alone in a room and wrestle with this great machine and uh first of all you really know your stuff i mean you know you know all of these great um documentaries and performances of classical piano so i'm i'm i'm uh impressed and flattered that to know that um that you like a thing i like but yeah i you're absolutely right i think martha ardrich onceattered that to know that um that you like a thing i like but yeah i you're absolutely right i think martha ardridge once said that you know her solo recitals just felt like the loneliest time in the world it that's not every pianist i mean arthur rubinstein was very much present with his audience and you know i think he said that he would even imagine a pretty girl in the audience and play for her but he he loved to share in live performance and i think i'm more on the

argrich or even gouldy inside of things of frankly it wasn't it wasn't concerts that got me into music it was recordings and it was a very private activity in fact i still feel uncomfortable when i go to live concerts. Everybody's around me. Can you guys leave? Can I just be in here alone? Because it is a private experience for the listener as well. But as a pianist, I mean, just sitting in a room for hours on end,

it is, I suppose, similar to programming. There's an input and an output, and the output's not always what you want. And there's something going on in the inside, and there's probably bugs in an output and the output's not always what you want and there's something going on on the inside and there's probably bugs in there and who knows but i like piano because compared with other instruments which i never got into although now i regret that i i wish i were more of a diverse in my um instrumental skill sets the way musicians used to have to be but i am a pianist only one week of string camp. Can't remember any of that. But I like that the pianist is detached from the production of sound. And that's actually invisible to us.

Now, this could be a trap for pianists who start approaching piano too much like a kind of typing or button-pressing activity. But actually, your connection, I mean, it's such an ingenious design, you know, from the early industrial evolution that your actual physical activity is immediately triggering this, you know, hammer action, this complex hammer action, this escapement on the inside of the instrument.

And so, but you can't see that. So all you have is this you know interface and you have to uh you have to sort of like develop a kind of connection with that and it's really hard and i'm still trying to do it better and i'm trying to help other people do it better but i think the the biggest difference between piano and coding because otherwise they have a lot of interesting similarities that the solitary nature it's just the physical and athletic requirement i mean at the end of the day piano is an intense physical activity we're all injured we don't like to talk about it but we're all injured and maybe you maybe you coder types get a little injured sometimes you

know maybe a little like oh my neck hurts or something you need some occupational therapy but pianists like actually we need we need serious like help sometimes with this so yeah and i i forget what the story is like didn't schumann like wreck his uh hands like because he made these little exercises like there was they didn't know much about piano technique in the 19th century the people who did it well i think were sort of figured it out naturally and so they didn't know much about piano technique in the 19th century. The people who did it well, I think, were sort of figured it out naturally. And so they had all kinds of ridiculous ideas. He was trying to get independence in his fourth finger. And the fourth finger is conjoined. Chopin said it was the Siamese twins of the hand. And they're sort of conjoined right here. And so what he thought was like, he needed a contraption to learn how to isolate each finger. Well, it turns out, you know, we know this a lot now,

also from research in the 20th century, that isolating your fingers is basically a ticket to having a career-ending debilitating injury. And so that's what happened to Schumann. He came up with this contraption to try to help isolate the fourth finger, and it ended up ruining him, contributing in part to his misery. Although it's good to have miserable composers, because the music is night and dark.

He squeezed some beautiful, beautiful stuff out of the misery. You don't want a too happy composer. You know, Chopin was just so melancholy all the time. And would we have wanted him to be different? I mean, maybe, maybe we want Chopin to be happy, but we're okay with the results he put into his music. But yeah, for sure. There's just, there's a lot more knowledge now about what to do and what not to do with the hand. Although I still think not enough and it's not standardized and there's still a lot more research that needs to be done into it and there's a lot of

gurus and a lot of schools of thought and they they all have their dogmas and so actually part of my work at tone base was just kind of trying to collect these people and say let's get some like let's get what these you know different experts are saying about piano technique and what's interesting is how often they saying about piano technique and what's interesting is how often they disagree with each other so it's still a heated it's still a heated debate but at least we know that we shouldn't be tying or putting our finger in these contraptions anymore yeah it really is interesting i mean like i'm not surprised at all that you have people having wildly different opinions about interpretation so and like i want you know one of

the weird things i do like god bless youtube like i like i do think it is actually one of the most wonderful things uh ever not just for piano nerds but you know any any sort of nerd like you want to go obsess on something but you know like i watch i was just this morning uh you know preparing for this like uh like i want to talk about the uh i want to talk about the you know the instrument and the art is like you know two different things because i i think um yeah when you think about something like ai like if you think about you know ai is both instrument and art together like like you, you, you just are getting confused. But if you think about AI as an instrument for an artist to use to go make something, it becomes altogether interesting. And so I was watching this morning, Murray Pariah doing a masterclass in 2022 on the G minor ballad, Chopin, which is my favorite piece of music.

And Murray, like one of his performances is my very favorite performance of that. And, you know, like and like there's a, you know, the part of that ballad that is that moves me the most is like the lead up to bar 106. You know, so like, you know, when you release all of the tension, it's like that double fortissimo. It's the big dramatic moment in the middle of the piece. And what he was asking this student to do is like there's this chord in the lead up to 106. And he's like, what does death sound like and he's like this is death and he's like you know you need to like have this passage this line that you're playing you know like be foreboding and like as if death is chasing you

and not everybody has that in their mind like when they're playing that particular passage. Like I know Zimmerman's got a different thing. I've seen Stephen Hough do a master class on the same thing. And so that's the thing that's just super fascinating to me. It's like you can have the same instrument and the same score and get something fundamentally different out of it for you you the performer and it like lands on the audience in a different way like murray's performance of this like gives me like it sends goosebumps up my spine every time i listen to it i've listened to it hundreds of times you know z Zimmerman's performances are like very, very good. It just doesn't do the same thing.

And I don't know why. It's also interesting that there's almost no spoilers in classical music. It's almost the reverse. It's knowing what's coming that builds the anticipation and the goosebumps.

And for me, it's knowing a piece really well that makes, if it's a great piece, that makes repeated listenings so meaningful. But yeah, it's interesting to compare what you're describing to AI, and you would know much more about this than I would. But at least from what I can tell, classical piano and the literature and the art of interpreting it, I mean, these are expressions of human consciousness. Yes. Chopin's first ballade is an expression of his organized consciousness,

and he's expressing something. And the only way we can agree about the piece is if we just speak in generality as well. It's dramatic. It seems to tell a story, whatever. But the moment you get into details and you want to talk about how this phrase should be rendered. It's death for Murray Pariah. It's life affirming for somebody else. It's dark for this interpreter. It's bright. I mean, it's dry for Glenn Gould. It's wet for Horowitz, right? There's just suddenly the interpreter's consciousness

is then mixed with the composer's and you get a new cocktail of whatever thing we can't describe, you know. And, yeah, I mean, maybe one day we will be sort of comparing Horowitz and Pariah's Chopin Ballade to AI's different version of it. And we can input, well, I want to hear an AI sort of play it with this kind of expression. I don't know. I mean, I'm not – you might have a comment on that. Is that coming? Should we be concerned? have something inside of you that you're trying to express that's difficult or impossible to

express any other way and it's like part of you know your humanity and you are you know it has meaning if you just play it for yourself uh and it has a different meaning if you play it for an audience uh who are going to receive it in probably a different way than you are maybe even intending when you play it. Right. Like I, like I'd never thought of death before hearing Murray's performance until I saw him teach that after. So like, that's not the thing I'm thinking of. It's like, you know, just this incredible emotional response that I get to it that I can't really put words on. And I think that's a beautiful connection that you've made, even though maybe that's not even what he was intending to do. Yeah, well, the whole question of composer's intentions is vexed.

But I think it's interesting what you said, because I could also change your mind. I mean, one of the things about my videos is I think I've converted a few people to Glenn Gould who would have never thought that they would want to listen to him. But also, you know, I made these videos about you and Sean Lim. Except for Seymour Hoffman. You did not change his mind. Seymour Bernstein, yeah. But he did. Bernstein, sorry.

He did. Well, Philip Seymour Hoffman, RIP. But Seymour Bernstein still kicking at 97. Didn't change his mind, but he did respect my sort of longer Gould documentary that I made a few months ago. And I was able to sort of distill two perfectly valid conceptions and approaches and ways of regarding the playing of Mozart, Brahms, and Bach. For me, I was, well, so he gave the argument on personal feeling. terms of connecting with his sense of the way one should touch and turn these phrases so that they speak from the heart. And I kind of said back to him, you're absolutely right. He doesn't speak from the heart. Gould is up to something else. I mean, he's trying to design these sort of,

you know, almost sonic oral landscapes that are organic and speak on their own terms and aren't related to our personal feelings, but somehow float above us. They're sort of part of the cosmos. They're hypnotic. They're often, they have a kind of regularity to them. And it feels like the universe is pulsating and that we're just sort of attaching ourselves to it. It's a very different aesthetic experience in listening to music than wanting to be touched, wanting to be moved. So that's what's great about it. You can feel all kinds of things up here and here and here. And then when we have discussions and debates, it's not about being right.

It's about learning more about what it means to feel something personally or what it might mean to experience art in a different way. And just the comments on those videos about Gould and I'd say about Yunshan, too. I mean, not everybody thought Yunshan's performance was the greatest of Rachmaninoff of all time. And they let me know it in the comments, but it became even more interesting because I got to see what did I hear that I, you know, what did I hear that made me like it so much? And then I had to examine my own biases and my own influences. And I realized some people are expecting something completely different from this piece. And, and, and that's where it just, it becomes about this human interchange and human exchange of ideas.

And so, yeah, perhaps, perhaps if an AI sort of interfered with that, they would, they would be just a nuisance um so yeah it is sort of it yeah i mean like a couple of things uh that you know uh what you just said made me think like one is like i think artists uh like gold and um like glenn golden horrors is the same way and part of what makes them exciting to me is like, they're not consistent across their performances of the same repertoire. Like there's this Glenn Gould performance of Bach's Italian concerto where, you know, like third movement, like he's playing,

like it does rip roar in time. And like, that's yeah. And that's, that's the one that i love like i i was like i i find it incredibly compelling and then later on in life you know he's like plays it at like what must be just half the tempo that he was playing in that uh you know younger recording it's like i i don't care for it um but like he he's evidently had some reconceiving of you know like what it is he's looking for in the score. He did it with the Italian concerto, but most famously with the Goldberg Variations. And that's what he sort of launched his career with.

But then he reflected on his own interpretation and he realized this isn't so organic. It doesn't add up. He says it just sounds like 30 independent variations with a mind of their own. And Gould had a kind of modernist sensibility. He believed in the autonomy of art. He believed that it should somehow all sort of operate on its own logic and its own terms. And to have a kind of variety show was, you know, something too much out of the mundane world. He wanted the Goldberg variations to somehow, again, float above our human engagement with it and therefore proceed from one variation to the next with a kind of mathematical proportionality.

And he mapped this all out. And for some people, they can hear that sort of measured quality and it's totally alienating. Sounds like maybe that might have been your experience. I love that. I think that the fact that he starts with one pulse and he takes it for an hour and he travels through this whole, you know, spiral of variations and then he comes back to the beginning and somehow you

felt like it was one thing. That's for me, that's just a towering achievement, you know? So. Yeah. Oh, I love, I love his Goldberg variations as well. You know, Harwood's, for many, many, many, many years, was by far and away my favorite pianist. And he's still my single favorite piece of music, and my single favorite performance of it is his. So it's Skryabin's Opus eight, number twelve.

So like the D minor, D sharp, sharp, sharp. Sorry, not a key, not a key you want to touch. It's very prickly. Yeah. Yeah. And his performance in that 1968 televised concert is like I think like the most compelling thing I've ever heard. That's the piece, that performance is part of the reason I'm a pianist. I mean, that exact performance of that exact piece, when I first saw it, also just something about the color of that old, you know cbs live performance from behind the piano and he and it he comes out with this strong bass uh and it's one of the most rhapsodic passionate

you know pieces i've ever i've never heard of scrabble before and i was an immediate convert when i saw that um sorry to interrupt you but i have to just because it relates to something you said before that piece i took i had to learn it because of or it's just like i relates to something you said before that piece I took, I had to learn it because of, or it's just like, I had to learn the variations because of gold. Well, yeah. And actually I thought this, there's no way I could play it, but in college, again, I had the time to be crazy enough to sit down and figure out how to make all those left hand jumps work.

And it's good that it's in D sharp minor because that means you're almost exclusively playing black keys, which on the page looks frightening but if you just look at the keyboard and you forget about how all this is notated it's actually more comfortable in certain ways to use the black keys that way and so these jumps started to fit and I realized I could redistribute some with my right hand and I just needed to basically master a couple of challenging octave parts. And I was starting to, you know, do my best Horowitz interpretation or impression. I took this piece to Jerry Lowenthal, one of my teachers at Juilliard, and he hadn't heard me play it before. And I was about to play

it on the radio somewhere and I just wanted to run it for him. And I come in and I start with the Horowitz just bashing the left-hand octaves, but I know just cacophony. And he stops me. Stop, stop, stop. Why does everyone have to try to play this like Horowitz? You know, he said, and he showed me, he said, you know, first of all, there's no dynamic indication at the beginning. And you can start very quietly. And it's extremely effective. Later on, I saw there's a later Horowitz performance i think in london yes where he starts plays the same piece and he begins at almost pianissimo so even horowitz did the opposite right and so here i was imitating horowitz but i was actually just imitating one

performance that he gave uh wow we're really nerding out about this i hope your viewers are down if you don't know what we're talking about guys go go watch uh vladimir horowitz play skraven uh d sharp minor a2 to bus 8 number 12 immediately um from 1968. yeah it it is incredible um which you know sort of brings me to young chan lim uh which i i think is a thing that um you know folks are not familiar like they should definitely go to YouTube or to their favorite streaming platform or whatnot and start listening to some of the work by this kid. that there's just something very deeply human about this art form that I think people can get very confused about. Yeah, because like, you've got a technical instrument and like a very technical discipline of playing. But like the thing that's miraculous about it is like the human piece of it so like how and like you know what i'm talking about like yun chun lim is like he's 20 years old now

um maybe 21 uh just 20 so yeah so a couple years ago uh at the van cliburn piano competition which is one of the world's uh like big piano competitions for young musicians to go prove themselves to the world. He wins the competition and there's a concerto performance at this competition. Like everyone was performing the Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. He comes out and delivers this performance that was unbelievable. One where the conductor is wiping a tear away from her eyes, the orchestra that was playing with him had this crazy reaction to the performance.

It's just unbelievable. Up until that point, like that 78, you know, Ormandy performance that Horowitz had given was like my high watermark. And I changed my mind. It was like, you know, this thing for 50 years was like test of time. Like so many people thought it was the best. And then all of a sudden they're changing their opinion. And part of it, it was like the whole performance. Like watching him play it was part of

what made it compelling and look so everyone should go watch your analysis of this performance because i think it's the best one on the internet trying to explain why it is that this young man had done something extraordinary with a hundred year old score and a multiple hundred years old instrument that has been played a million times, recorded thousands of times, analyzed within an inch of its life by like very smart people and very great artists. And yet, you know, here he comes and he does something new and surprising like he's amazing oh there's an old romantic notion that music is ineffable it expresses things that can't be expressed in words and i think we agree that there's truth to that you even said something that's similar. But it also, I think, has led to a deficit in good analysis and commentary,

at least in the popular mainstream of music. There's a kind of fear of talking about what makes a performance great or interpretation great. It's almost like explaining a joke. It's like, no, no, don't do that. This is supposed to hit us and then leave it alone. And I remember in college, somebody giving a lecture recital and there was somebody sort of grumbling next to me. It's like, can't we just let the music speak for itself? You know, that's, that's the thing you're supposed to say about it. And it's, I remember sort of being puzzled because I was always overly analytic

about everything. And here I am not letting music speak for itself, but speaking way too much about music, but people really appreciated that. I just took his performance and I helped. First, I clarified it for myself. What made this connect with me? And then when I listened back and took all these notes on everything, I realized, oh, he was listening to Horowitz here, or he sort of discovered an inner voice there. And it helped that I just heard countless performances of this over the years that I could sort of listen anew and hear somebody, on the one hand, synthesizing certain older interpretations, but also integrating them into his own new sort of take on it.

And what was fun about what I did, and I think what people really appreciated is they had this moving experience that they couldn't quite explain. And so to have somebody else help clarify for them what was so special about it made them want to re-listen. And so then when they re-listened and it got to those passages, they heard more. They actually heard a different, it was a different experience. I mean, we think, oh, I've heard that piece before, or even I've heard that recording before, but this music is way too rich. It's, there's too much going on. There's too much polyphony. There's tens of thousands of notes. There's,

there's infinite ways that you could, a variety of ways of approaching it and phrasing it, that even just listening to the same recording, you're going to notice a new detail. Or if you do know a detail's coming, you're going to enjoy it again in maybe a new way. And so I was actually showing people that there's a way to listen to classical music that they hadn't experienced before. One that necessitates re-listening. One that requires that you sort of notice things, become aware of them and appreciate when others point things out to you. Cause that's how I got into it. I had others be like, listen to this moment, you know, wait for it. Did you hear how they did? And so I

loved that kind of engagement with others. And YouTube is just, for me, the greatest opportunity to, uh, platform to sort of create that. It also, it also allows me to indulge my longstanding interest in just creating video, creating content. I've been editing videos since high school projects, you know, and finally it's coming to good use. Um, and so now I get to design these things where I both clarify things for myself and these video essays and analyses, but also I get to design the way it looks and how the score appears on the page. And I love editing the music so it's like one performance will sync up suddenly with another performance. You know, almost you didn't hear it, but now that helps you hear the difference. Like putting Horowitz and Argerich and Yunchan back to back to back. So it sounds like one seamless performance, but you can hear, you know, it helps just

bring into relief what's so different about them. And so I think I'm just getting started. I'm just starting to experiment with these techniques. And I think other people should do it too. I want there to be a bigger ecosystem of media and classical music content creators. There's some great ones out there, but for the most part, what I'm doing, I just kind of feel like, again, feel pretty lonely about it. Like I used to when I was just practicing Chopin by myself in the ninth grade. So yeah, it's an exciting time, I think, to bring

this otherwise thing we're nerding out about to to a broader public and i think a lot of people are interested in it so yeah i i think you're right i mean everyone i've shown that uh yun chan video that you made um has i think done exactly what you were intending um so they've gone back and re-listened to the performance and like they've heard something that they wouldn't have heard before and like i've been listening to classical piano 40 years now um and like it's even influenced the you know the way that i'm listening to things, which has been amazing. Have you heard he just recently made his proms debut and he did the Emperor. And like I think his encore was Bach's Siciliano.

And the Emperor was amazing. And I've listened to the emperor like a bazillion times. And so like my my default tactic before I'm going to sink a half an hour into this thing as I jump forward to the third movement. And I'm like, OK, are they going to disappoint me here? And if they don't, like, I'll go back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing. We have a lot in common. I I also I I used to actually, you mentioned the Horowitz Ormandy recording.

I used to just fast forward to the last minute of that because he has the most thrilling last page ever and the audience is going nuts before he finishes. I would just, it's like the, you know, in a way it's like, it's totally wrong to experience the music that way. But at the same time, I didn't care. It's like fast forwarding to the sort of game winning home run, the music that way. But at the same time, I didn't care. It's like, it's like fast forwarding to the,

the sort of game winning home run, the walk off home run at the end and just reliving the highlight. Um, I, I haven't heard his emperor yet. I'm excited to, I've heard his third and fourth concertos. So yeah,

I will tell you like, again, you should go listen to it, you know, draw your own conclusions. I won't say too much, uh, too much about it, but like, it is now my favorite performance of the emperor.

And by the fifth bar of the third movement, he's already doing something unusual. He completely ignores the fortissimo dynamic marking on the fifth bar. Usually it's, and it repeats. And on the repeat bar. Like usually it's dun-dun-da-dun-dun-da, and you know, and like it repeats. And on the repeat, he plays it piano. And I'm like, what is he going to do now? And so then I'm just like ready to be on the ride. And yet it feels organic. It doesn't feel gimmicky.

And he's able to, I was lucky enough to interview Maren Alsop for a video that hasn't come out yet. But she said something to this effect, like his rubatos are always surprising and yet they seem right. They seem organic and natural. There's a lot of surprising rubato, you know, the taking of time and musical phrasing. That's not organic. That sounds affected or, you know, it doesn't communicate or express itself exactly how the pianist imagines. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard to know how to feel a phrase in just a way that's going to communicate with the audience,

especially to do it in a new way. Most of our rubatos are just the conventional things our teacher tells us to do. Yunchan's just barely stopped being a teenager a couple months ago, and he's discovering new ways of articulating what's so great about his performances, especially in the fact that he's a champion of beethoven and bach right not just not just list and rachmaninoff but he goes back to the classics he he can play baroque counterpoint like you've never heard before that allows a kind of clarity in the bigger romantic concertos that i think makes this sort of separates him. And so I'm interested to hear his Beethoven.

He has such fantastic rhythmic drive and tautness that anything he does, there's always a sense that, oh, that landed exactly where I wanted it to. So it's just extremely gratifying to hear him because I'm getting to know him better also as a pianist. I feel like i know him personally because i've heard him interpret so many different pieces and you're right it's like it's this sense of i can't wait to hear what now what yun chan has to say about this piece and you know you've

made it at a pianist when when people want to hear your version of a million times. I am dying at this point to hear him do the G minor blad. I mean, he'll record it at some point. I'm sure. And it will be interesting. Well, you know, next year, he's playing the Goldberg Variations in Carnegie Hall. And so I look forward to that. I got to hear his 24, actually he played all 27 of them, Chopin etudes. He did the sort of extra three as

well in Carnegie and um yeah I mean it was it was phenomenal so yeah it's crazy like I haven't heard him play live yet but like I listened to the recording of those etudes and it's like it's just pretty incredible like the new things you did an interview with Mny axe where he was talking about horowitz where you know axe was saying like hey i think horowitz could like hear things in a score that like we couldn't and like he chose to put highlights on different things or to like bring your attention to things that other performers don't and i feel like Yun-Chan does that a lot, like with the Opus 9, No. 2, Nocturne, which is like a, I can play that piece, but not like he did.

Well, he finds secrets in it that nobody ever knew about before. A lot of this does come back to Bach. I'm wearing the t-shirt for a reason. When you play enough Bach, you start living inside different voices in a new way. You're not just listening. We're sort of trained in our culture to listen for melody, right? And then there's melody, and then there's the band.

The band's sort of accompanying you. There's a rhythm and bass section. Anyone who knows music and wants to be a musician uh and they get into music often they gravitate towards the bass because they realize you know the secret is the bass is actually what everything grows from but in bach's time there was still a kind of parity between voices and and he wrote every voice with integrity and autonomy and so when you practice enough of that you have to learn how to give life to inner voices because they are just as independent as the top voice. So if you're playing fugues or canons or inventions or anything that Bach wrote,

there's always this sense of like, wow, I have to, you know, there's no hierarchy here. There's just a sort of like interplay of equal voices. And unfortunately, that Bach is not, I think, taught enough. It's not stressed enough as a real art form pianist should aspire to be able to play in the highest way. It's more seen as like broccoli you're supposed to eat to be more nutritious. But Yunshan, he takes the three-part inventions of Bach and he makes them into little miracles. And so he's able to create art out of this otherwise seemingly archaic Baroque counterpoint. And that gives him a foundation for playing all of this romantic music or more recent music, because he has control over every element, every input that's going into a

texture. And so therefore, if it's an otherwise, you know, pleasant Chopin Nocturne, that's what just pa-pa on the left hand and the melody in the right, he's discovering and showing you through his expert finger independence and ability to balance on just the right notes to voice them in a way that suddenly allows them to emerge from a texture. That comes from his Bach training, and it allows his Chopin to speak in an absolutely new way. And so these are all things I want to make videos about, by the way, I need to, I need to write these down. But this is the stuff that I want people to hear because I have so much pleasure myself discovering them and, and hearing it for myself. And so, um, it's, it's nice to, to, do you have friends who, who also like piano this much in your world? I don't know. Maybe it is kind of a thing in the tech world. I have friends who are obsessed about different things. I don't know anyone who's quite as obsessed as I am, which is why I was excited to talk to you today.

Yeah, but look, so here's maybe the way that I will say it. Chopin Nocturne or you're watching some other great feat of human performance like Alex Honnold, free soloing El Cap. Or I think there's just this beautiful thing about watching human beings do things that are right at the ragged edge of human performance and then doing them in a way where they show everybody else uh like the art of the possible and like something new and nuanced and interesting that you've never seen before and it's the thing where you know like in my world you know where we get um into these debates about what the role of technology is in making art. I always come down on the side that art is about the artist and the audience, it's not about the instrument.

Because piano was like new technology at some point. And the art that comes from AI is only going to be as interesting as the artists who are able to say something new and interesting and human with it. Absent that, it's like a phenomenon that you're observing and it just doesn't have a human element. And I think things that don't have human elements are like very different than you know things like a you know performance that does yeah i think the instrument in that sense is somewhat trivial it's it's it's what humans do with it on the other hand there's something special about the particular mechanical

invention of the piano and i would say the perfection of that instrument in the sort of late 19th early 20th century right around the same time the bicycle i think was being perfected and has never changed and even if we have motorized bikes and or ai riding bikes for us self-driving bikes we're also still going to get on it and pedal because there's just something perfect about what how that technology is integrated into a human form. You know, there's something so human about riding a bike. There's something so human about playing the piano. So in that sense, that older technology really did, I think, peak in terms of mating with human beings.

And you don't need some singularity to achieve that. So I do want to sort of, you know, say that perhaps some technology doesn't need to be improved on, you know, and some things sort of did reach a pinnacle in terms of, I don't know if you agree with that. Got a little sidetracked there, but. Yeah, I look, I think I, I think like, obviously there, there hasn't needed to be an improvement to the form factor of the piano. Although one of my very, very favorite stories, I tell this to engineers all the time, is you must have seen the performances of Josef Hoffman. I think there are two videos of him, one playing the third movement of the Emperor, funny enough,

and one of him playing C one playing the third movement of the emperor, funny enough. And like one of them playing, uh, yeah, C sharp minor. Um, and like, it's, it's like just unbelievable to watch. And like one at one of the stories that I've heard about, yeah, he comes in really high. He knows, he knows exactly where those keys are going to be. Yeah. So, you know, one of the, one of the awesome things about Hoffman is he was an inventor. Like I think he invented the shock absorber. And my understanding is he had a smaller hand, uh, than some of the performers like Rachmaninoff who were like his contemporaries. And like, one of the things that he did was he had a keyboard manufactured where the keys were just a little bit smaller

so that he could more easily cover a tenth with his size hand. And it's like one of the, you know, it is just a reminder to me that you don't always have to take the constraints of technology as given. Like there's nothing holy about a piano that says that the keys have to take the constraints of technology is given. There's nothing holy about a piano that says that the keys have to, and you're just shit out of luck being a performer if you weren't born with a big enough hand. That's a solvable problem. DAN RICKSVARGAS.

By the way, there's kind of a movement that's developing in the conservatories that I know a few pianists who are pushing for every music school to have a smaller, like a slightly sized down instrument the way Hoffman ordered. It's funny that Joseph Hoffman was the dedicatee of Rachmaninoff's third concerto, because he never could play it, actually, despite being Rachmaninoff's favorite pianist, one of the greatest pianists of all time. His hands just weren't quite big enough. And speaking of Rock 3 and bringing this back to Alex Honnold, I do think that we're fascinated by the types of people whose brains are configured in whatever way that they have enough guts

to train to climb up El Capitan with no ropes on. And although I don't want to push this metaphor too much, there is a similarity in getting up on stage and climbing a rock, a rock Monanoff mountain with no music, right. It's sort of similar to not having any aid. And it's the sense of extreme occasions. You know, those of us, my wife plays rock three, I play rock two and rock four, you know, we're a rock Monanoff family. We're totally nuts. I mean, we're people who it's still crazy when we're walking on stage about doing one of these things i mean we can't we're sort of questioning you know our life choices every time we're pushed on stage and yet we do it and we're drawn back to it and

audiences are drawn to to observe it and i just wonder how much of that is you know we live lives that are just i think filled with so much banality that we need extreme occasions, whether we're the ones engaging in them and performing them or we're just experiencing them vicariously. We need this sense of transcending that just ordinary everyday junk that we're used to having to wait through. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think, at least i do like i i have

a real appreciation for people who do hard things like you know we could sort of uh i feel like i've kept you too long but uh you know like another like impossible piano thing that I was thinking about recently was Maria Joao Pires, you know, had this famous incident a whole bunch of years ago where she was called in to sub in for pianist for a concert at the last minute and she showed up thinking that she was going to play mozart's uh you know uh k488 uh and like what the orchestra started playing when she was at the keyboard was uh 466 and she's like sitting there at the keyboard like his own video she's like what like i and and she's like talking to the conductor saying like, I, you know, like I,

I feel like I can't. And he's like, ah, you know, you played it last year. Just, and she plays it. And like,

not only does she play, it's like really, really good. Uh, and it, it seems impossible. Like, how could that be?

And like, you look at it and it's like a miracle of a thing. And you're like, oh my God, like I'm, I'm glad to be a human being because like, I can't do what she did, but like, at least I'm in the same species. I feel lucky that I've gotten to see some of this up close. You mentioned my, this Chopin podcast, which I'm, which I'm launching in anticipation for the big Chopin year next year. We've got the national competition in January. We've got the international competition in October.

So I'm going to be making lots of Chopin content. So I just released this video with Garrick Olson where he breaks down all of Chopin's innovations at the keyboard and shows, he actually demonstrates from, you know, actually more than 20, it's 20 different inventions of Chopin, but dozens and dozens of examples in

which, oh, Chopin was the first to cross the second finger with a fifth finger or to have unrestricted use of the thumb on black keys, all these cool, just technical innovations at the piano. And we sort of break, he breaks them down one by one and demonstrates them. I went in there, I went in, no, but I went in there to his home just thinking, okay, well, he's got all the scores by him if we need to reference those. And we had not had a real meeting where I told him, you know, you need to be ready for these 42 excerpts from not just the beginnings of Chopin works, random passages from inside of them. And, you know, he just sort of unassumingly sat down and I called him out one at a time. And just off the top of his dome, he gave it to me.

Not just memorized. Oh, he remembered it. Beautifully rendered passages to demonstrate. You know, the production flew by. He was just, you know, and it was totally off the cuff and unprepared. I mean, he'd been preparing his whole life for it. And, you know, he's a special human being. And so he has the capacity for it. And so for him, it's, there's a nonchalance about it all. But for me, and I do this kind of thing, sort of, it was still impressive. I wish people could see what I was seeing, because they're going to see

the end product, which is going to be edited. But the true story is that like, Garrett Golson blew my mind for two hours. You know, there's another piece of meta content I could just make about what I witnessed. And I think it was similar for Maria Joao Perez. It was just on some level between her ear and her experience and how long she's lived with Mozart's music and perform these concertos. She sat there slightly puzzled and shocked for a moment. Then she collects herself and she's like, yeah, I know it. I got this. And it's amazing. So it is amazing. And like, and maybe that's a, that's a great place to end. So yeah, the thing that's really interesting to me about this stuff is the layering it's like not just the rendered art but it's the human being rendering it and like both are compelling uh and and so like i i think

you know we just should never lose track of that i think it's very well said and i would just add it's it's also historical art form we are having conversations with history, with the way not just human beings alive today think and feel about music, but how they felt about it 100, 200, 300 years ago. And I think that's also special. And it's not something we do enough of in our world of finding opportunities and aspects of culture and art forms to take us back into history and learn something about how we got to this point so that's what another just a yet another facet of classical piano that i think is so special and cool and that i wish i wish all your friends and all my friends uh could love it

as much as we do so i suppose i'll just keep making youtube videos until yeah until i've achieved that i think that's what you should do all All right, so very, very last question that I ask every guest before we close. So you've got a super fun job that you're very passionate about. What do you do in your spare time, like when it's not playing piano and making YouTube videos about playing piano? Two answers to that.

One, when I worked at ToneBass, you know, I was working at a startup. And so you'd think, oh, I'm immersed in music all day, sort of, but also I was immersed in metrics and meetings and learning new applications and emails. So actually for a while, believe it or not, my hobby to get away from my tech job was practicing the piano.

And I was able to keep learning repertoire. So that shouldn't count because it is technically part of the profession. But I come from a sports family. It's not something anybody in my field really cares about, it seems like. But it's given me some inspiration for my videos. I mean, sports analysis, I think, and sports media and sports talk. I'm borrowing from some of those techniques. And I wish there were more of a media network for classical music as there is for sports.

So, but like, if I just need to get my mind off of the next six videos that I'm somehow going to have to make this month, uh, and, uh, or, or the next piece I have to learn to teach or whatever it is, um, I just turn on, turn on just sort of inane sports talk, people yapping about the NBA and the NFL. And, and so I enjoy following that. And it just takes me back to my childhood. I, you know, I played sports a lot. I always liked sports statistics and data, and I was into those sorts of things. So it's just kind of, I'm not even, it doesn't even matter. It's just like, I put that on and it helps me get away. But other than that, just spending time with my wife when I can, spending time with my family. It's just, I have such an intense job. I have to shut my, I'm always thinking about the next thing. I'm sure you can relate to this. I'm always,

even when I'm never off the clock. At ToneBase, I was always in my head designing the next, planning the next project, designing the next video or lesson planning for the next artist, just going on in my head until suddenly I fell asleep. And so to be honest, it's something I struggle with. I need to find more ways to disconnect, but I at least have these distractions.

And so I like to rekindle some of my, my, um, interests and passions from when I was younger. And, you know, at the moment, uh, yeah, sports is one of those. Awesome. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I'm glad you're out there doing what you're doing. So thank you so much for taking a little bit more than an hour to chat with us today, man. Thank you, Kevin. It was a real pleasure and an honor to be on Behind the Tech. What a fantastic conversation with Ben Lottie. So I'm going to be honest with you.

I took piano lessons as a kid, but I actually primarily took voice lessons. I don't know a lot about classical piano. I have sometimes been served by the algorithm, various, you know, kind of classical music or music interpretation, things that I've watched and enjoyed. But a lot of what the two of you were talking about, completely over my head. But I had a great time. And it actually made me want to go back and like watch some of his videos and really see if I can pick up more, you know, get more of the intricacies of what you were talking about. I want to ask you real quick before we get into some of what you two talked about.

How did you discover Ben? How did you come across him to begin with? Oh, I've been, since I was a little kid, for whatever reason, and I still don't entirely understand it. I've always found piano to be a compelling instrument. It may be, you know, all the way back to, you know, it being the, you know, my favorite part of going to church on Sunday was, you know, we had this, you know, little old lady who was like dear and sweet, who, you know, had taught herself how to play piano at a pretty high level. And like, that was the part of that sunday that i always enjoyed the most and like i would try to go sit in the church uh as close as possible to so that i could see her hands when

she played because i was just fascinated by the whole thing um and so like i've just been hooked uh ever since um you know and it was hard to be hooked on classical piano in rural central virginia in the 70s and 80s because this was not what the cool kids did and like they're just there there were there was nobody else who you know around me who was obsessed by this stuff nobody to talk to and no internet to go explore. And, you know, I've been on YouTube. Like one of the one of the amazing things about YouTube is from pretty early on in the platform, people started posting piano performance there. And like the

volumes has been higher and higher and higher. And then you know, so like, I'm constantly on the lookout for new and interesting classical piano content on the Internet. And then, you know, I've been watching Ben's content for a whole bunch of years now, ever since like Tone Bass first got started. Because like, honestly, from a. I think he said it in the interview, like he borrows a whole bunch of techniques from sports reporters, like people who are like common commenting on sports performance. And it really does make his content accessible. So like he's talking about,

you know, piano performance instead of sports performance, but yeah, it's a similar sort of approach. And like, it's really really uh like fun to watch his content i think yeah no totally i i've seen some of his videos um and and i also i've been served like i said from the algorithm weirdly a bunch of drum videos where people do

similar things where they analyze drum performances and drum solos mostly in that case not in classical works but but in in popular if you like if you like uh if you like drum videos like the thing uh like somehow or another algorithm put this in my feed the other week there's this uh platform called drumeo yes okay that's what i saw and the musicians who play the things without ever hearing it without ever hearing the drum part yeah and so like the best thing on their platform is the drummer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, like playing this 30 Seconds to Mars song where he gets to hear the song with no drum in the track and like he listens to like a few bars of it and

then he just nails it. Like it's unbelievable. Nails it. No, it and then he just nails it like it's unbelievable nails it no it is it is and actually it's funny because i was thinking about that a little bit while the two of you well you and ben were talking about the different interpretations of work right and which which is so interesting right because it is interesting you can have you know in this case it's someone who doesn't even have the notations to go on right they don't even have the notes they literally are hearing all the other parts that are having to kind of create and fill in the drum parts. But it is, in some ways, very similar to classical music where you have the work as it's written, but it can be interpreted different ways. And even his example, in one case, he was trying to replicate another pianist's approach to a piece of work. But that was only one aspect of that piece of work.

It turns out that was only one instance where it was played. It became very famous, but it wasn't even the way that he did it all the time. And that, to me, is such an interesting and, I think, unique part of music. And in some ways, I feel like there are direct juxtapositions that you can draw to tech because you can create a function and you can create a program that can solve the same thing multiple ways. But in some ways, it kind of goes against some of our thinking in ones and zeros way because you want things to always build and run a certain way. And so I was curious kind of from your perspective of someone who is deeply into piano and is also deeply into, you know, tech, where do you see kind of some of like, I guess, maybe the

similarity points in how, you know, art and code kind of intersect? Yeah, I've always thought that there was this thing going on with code that is more than just a mechanical thing. Like one of the reasons that I've loved being a programmer for so many years is like I have these ideas in my head and things that I want to do that are difficult to articulate or difficult to accomplish any other way than writing code. And in a certain sense, it like feels more like a mode of expression than it feels like this, you know, sort of mechanical thing where it's like, all right, like I had to crank this code out and, you know, get it done on time and like, you know, punch the clock and done. Right. And look, there's some amount of grinding like that, that you have to do to accomplish, uh, like, you know,

sort of interesting things at scale and teams of other people, but like, you know, the very best moments that I've had as a programmer, like, I feel like I'm expressing something and, uh, like it feels like you're making a little piece of art and, you know, the aesthetic aspect of what you're doing is maybe just as important or more important than the, you know, the mechanical aspect of it. And so I think that's pretty similar to, you know, like what to listen to a piano performance where, you know, the pianist is just sort of robotically playing exactly the notes that are on the score as notated by the composer. Right. Like the thing that audiences, I think, are looking for is like, you know, what do you as the performer bring to this score that is interesting or different? Like, how do you help us hear something that we've

never heard before? Like, what is it about you, like in the moment of the performance that is interesting that we can connect with? And so like, I think that's, you know, just sort, it's like the interesting thing. Ben and I chatted about this. There is this aspect of piano performance and computer programming that's kind of the same. You've got this machine, it's unruly,

it's complicated, it takes a long time to master. The process of mastering it requires that mostly it's like you and the machine wrestling. And, you know, it's like, you know, can be a solitary activity. But, you know, I think the, you know, the interesting thing about both of those media is not that mechanical thing. It's not the fact that like, hey, like I'm a good programmer now and like I can write like this huge range of programs or like, hey, I'm like I have the dexterity and like all the theory in my head and like I can play like any score that you stick in front of my nose.

It's like the interesting thing is what you choose to do with that capability and who you're doing it for. Yes. Yes. No, I think well said. And yeah, I think that that's true for both disciplines. And it's also one of those things, this is true with code and with art, how you create something and how it's also one of those things, this is true with code and with art, how you create something and how it's interpreted, what your intent and how things are interpreted can be different.

You know, what your intent is when you put code out in the world and how people use it are different. Same with music, right? Like how someone, you know, writes a score or even, you know, releases a produced piece of work and how it's interpreted and how it makes people feel are not the same.

Sometimes they can be, but they're not always. And that I think is pretty magical regardless of what we're talking about. Yeah. And I've been having this argument with a bunch of people for like the best bunch of months. Like there are some people who, you know, like some of these, like their videos online, like, you know, Reid Hoffman and I did a conversation with jj abrams about you know ai and filmmaking you know jj's a super good friend but you know uh i've got a slightly different point of view about where things are likely headed and like it and

my point of view is um art is not about the instrument. And like AI is the instrument here. Art is about like what humans choose to do with the instrument. And, you know, I think, you know, we've seen it in every other flavor of, you know, technological instrument that we've ever built. Like the interesting thing about it

is how it gets wielded uh like not uh you know like it's it's not a thing in and of itself that's particularly compelling unless you're unless you're a technician like there are things about pianos right like you know if you are you know if you're like there's this new newish piano company fazioli right like you would sort of think that you know pianos donos don't need refinement and no new piano companies need to get created. But, you know, there's this Italian piano company that got created over the past handful of decades that's making what many people believe are the world's best pianos. And so, you know, if you're the founder of Fazioli, you're very interested in the instrument, right? But even then, the instrument is only worth making if you can find artists who want to play it to go make something interesting with.

Exactly. If they can do things, cameras are the same way. Right. Like I've had so many camera advancements and that can be used by maybe a greater cross-section of people than pianos. However, it's the exact same thing. You know, the lens technology and the sensor technologies and what's being done is only useful if the people who are really technicians and are really skilled with what they can do with it. I think that's a very, very good example because like a camera is absolutely ubiquitous right now. All of us have a better camera in our pockets than our parents ever had in their entire lifetime. Yes. Like they're extraordinarily good cameras. That does not mean that you can take a good photo. A good photo is you see something that you want to

encapsulate in a photograph that actually has a point of view and that when you show it to someone else, like it helps them see a thing that they can't see with their own two eyes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Some of the best photographs I've ever taken were with a Holga camera that when I was in college, I it was a toy camera that I retrofitted to a Polaroid and the, you know, the, it's not great resolution and, and some of the other things aren't good, but just the, the, what the shots I was able to get and some of the things that I got with it are some of my favorites, whether other people think that or not has nothing to do with the tool itself. Like you said, it's what the person has seen, what they're able to create with it.

And I don't know what your thought is on this. I think we might align, but like the way I look at AI is that we need to be cautious about how these things can be overused and maybe used in some ways that we don't want. But I firmly believe that the best musicians are going to use these as just another tool,

the same way they've been using technology for decades. And that it's not going to take someone who's not a musician and make them one, but it will be something that will take artists and maybe enhance or augment what they do. Yeah, I think that's, I think you and I are aligned. I think I think in the hands of someone who's got a vision and a point of view and creativity that it will let them do extraordinary things. And but, you know, I think if you don't have those things, like if you are not if you if you're not very deliberate about like, how can I use the tool to like the extent of its ability to make something

extraordinary, like you're not going to get anything extraordinary out of it. Definitely. Definitely. And I'm grateful that we have people like Ben who are teaching people the fundamentals and are talking about and interpreting and dissecting and doing the play by play so that even people like me can, you know, have more respect and grasp more about the works we hear. Yeah, it was a fun conversation. Absolutely. All right, that is all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much to Ben Lottie

for joining us. Remember to send in your questions to Kevin, behindthetech at microsoft.com, voice memos or written questions, and then Kevin's going to answer some of them on an upcoming episode. You can follow Behind the Tech on your favorite podcast platform or you can check out our full video episodes on YouTube. Thanks for listening.