The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 101 Konstantin Soukhovetski: Tribe Q&A Session

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger podcast, episode number 101. This is a live Mind Over Finger Tribe Q&A session. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice and building a purposeful career. And now, your host, violinist, teacher, and high-performance coach, Dr. Renée-Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. I hope you're doing amazingly well as you tune into this episode. This summer on the Mind Over Finger podcast, I'm having a fantastic time with wonderful guests. Every month, I'm having a live Q&A session with amazing musicians in my Facebook group,

Starting point is 00:00:55 the Mind Over Finger Tribe, and as to be expected, much wisdom is being shared. We started in April with pianist Konstantin Sukovitsky. We continue in May with violinist Callum Smart. In June, you'll hear from trumpet player Christopher Still from Honesty Pill. July will bring violinist Esther Abrami and we'll spend some time with guitarist Brandon Jack Acker in August I hope you can join us live for the upcoming sessions all of the details are in the Mind Over Finger Tribe

Starting point is 00:01:27 at facebook.com slash groups slash Mind Over Finger Tribe if you're enjoying today's content take a screenshot as you're listening share on social and tag me and my guests so we can thank you for tuning in And without further ado, let's go to the show. Hi everyone, hope you're doing great. This is really special today.

Starting point is 00:02:01 I'm so excited to have a good friend, Konstantin Sukovitsky. I say a good friend, we haven't seen each other in, I can say decades, unfortunately. in touch all throughout the years exactly that's the beautiful thing about the internet it just helps nurture you know the friendships like this i love that and before i you know leave the i don't know how you say in english leave the floor no i don't leave the floor before i give you the room or whatever you guys say in english i want to give um a little reminder to everyone that the Music Mastery Experience is open for enrollment. And, you know, the tagline for this, I know it by memory now,

Starting point is 00:02:49 and I mean every word of it, it's your transformational journey to loving the practice room, rocking the stage, winning the job of your dreams, and taking your career to new heights. What it is, if you've never heard of it, it's a highly personalized group coaching experience, three months, and we start June 1st. and i'm going to have you ready to rock by september so if you're looking to gain more mastery on your instrument you want to feel empowered in the practice room you want to feel

Starting point is 00:03:21 confident in performance you want to start seeing amazing results in your musical life i have what you need i mean they give you the tools to feel empowered to go from stuck to free or shaky to confident you're going to know how to practice and prepare for performance no doubts you are going to get maximal results you're going to feel like you achieve your full potential and you're going to get this guidance to get to these powerful results these are the tools that help me win jobs win competitions and perform optimally in my career so you're going to progress faster, feel like you're performing at your best, feel confident. So I don't know if that sounds good to you, feeling empowered, confident, less stress, more fulfilled, and you want to reconnect

Starting point is 00:04:15 with your love of music. Because the big thing throughout all of this is this connection that we want to have with the purpose, with the love of music, with the engagement, with the process itself. It's not just about the result. The results are the journey itself as well. So we don't want to lose sight of that. But it's also going to help you save time if you're a busy mom or dad like me, but you still need to perform at the highest level. You want more results and a higher quality of life. All of this are things that we cover in the program. And there's also an amazing group of super supportive musicians. There's already several people in the program. They are amazing. I'm so excited. I can't wait to get started to work with all of these amazing

Starting point is 00:05:07 people. And they're going to give you this motivation, this accountability, the inspiration. So, you know, if this is something that sounds good to you, you're looking to take things to the next level and have optimal performance time after time and enjoy the journey on the way there go to mindoverfinger.com find all the details there book your free conversation with me and let's make it happen so there's everything you need to walk on stage or in the audition room fully confident and if you're a student if you're a teacher you're going to be able to give all of these tools to your students so um yeah i call this the high performance toolkit so anyway if this is something that sounds good to you again go to mindoverfinger.com slash mme book your free

Starting point is 00:06:00 call and together let's see if it's a good fit for you and i'm actually going to put the link right here thank you for sitting through this constantine my pleasure it's interesting i love it. And I love the name too, Mind Over Finger. Thank you. I spent a lot of time thinking about that. Oh, hi, Sarah. Hi, Suzanne. So, okay, enough about me, Constantine. Can you please tell us a little bit about you, how your journey unfolded in how all of this, you know what, I'm going to put you right here in the center. Here we go. Love it. Okay, well, in America, it unfolded just when we met, you and I, 22 years ago in Santa Barbara, which was where I came directly from Moscow, which was the summer before my freshman year

Starting point is 00:06:56 at Juilliard. And, I mean, my story obviously began in Moscow, Russia, which is where I'm born, and from, and spent the first 18 years of my life. and i was always um i was double major in piano and composition and music theory but besides that i was always kind of um inclined to branch out so while i was in the moscow central special school you know as a pianist and a composer you know very serious Beethoven sonatas getting ready for competitions and stuff like that you know i was singing pop at a uh russian um it was called factory for stars type thing um it was acting theater i was anchoring children's news on

Starting point is 00:07:40 weekends on television so i was always sort of a show bit i always said i felt like a showbiz uh personality in a classical musician's body and then um when i showed up at juilliard i discovered that actually you couldn't really do anything but at the time just concentrate on on the craft of your you know real serious focus which generally speaking is what we should all do but i think ironically it was a little bit ahead of the curve because right now everyone is doing what i was doing 20 years ago and in fact it's taught you know that i think there is a new term now called portfolio career you know doing all these things but when i really was doing them most people weren't really getting why would i even bother doing anything but practice and you

Starting point is 00:08:35 know listen to classical music uh so um so that's in short my journey because right now and all these years later i mean i'm an ancient 40 year old and so you know i um i'm enjoying the career as a performer right as a concert pianist as a composer as a lyricist as an actor as a producer as an educator obviously I teach but I developed my own system called narrative musicianship which is acting technique adapted for instrumental musicians where you don't have words to say but you have to create narrative and act it out and in it we really dig into approaching music as an actor studies a script so I have everybody literally mark up the score as an actor not with musical terms but with kind of notes to find the script if actors any good

Starting point is 00:09:30 not in the soaps perhaps uh so anyway sorry i don't mean to be so it's coffee that's doing it you see so um that is essentially um a result of my early on uh interest in other things outside of just narrow field of playing piano. And I'm sure all of these activities fuel each other. Absolutely. I mean, the more I do what I do, the more interested in it I become. You have to have a third-party perspective. So my interest in music usually is triggered by literature or a play

Starting point is 00:10:14 or some just random thought. I'm a super science nut. I mean, I watch, I don't read fiction anymore. I mean, I just read scientific and medical articles all the time. Like I watch, you know, how to split an atom type documentaries. Like I'm just into it. I think in an alternative reality, I would probably in another life, I would have been a scientist in robotics or something

Starting point is 00:10:35 because I'm really fascinated by it. I love it. I have gadgets. I use them all the time. And I get a lot of inspiration from it. In fact, it's the human versus the machine that makes the human matter. Right. Oh, this is so inspiring. It's really amazing. And I'm so glad that you mentioned the class that you're giving at Juilliard,

Starting point is 00:10:57 because that was one of the questions that we got in. Oh, and I forgot to write down who sent that. I think it was Darlene. Was it you, Darlene? she was wondering if you could talk about the interpretation enhancement course narrative musicianship based on russian acting method that you're teaching at the juilliard school and share some of your thoughts on interpretation absolutely so uh we actually i taught the pilot course this fall semester at juilliard's evening division uh i'm teaching a different course in the summer there um the russian piano miniatures but uh hopefully i'll do that again because this

Starting point is 00:11:36 is a course that is designed for advanced players right professionals or it can be amateurs there were a couple people who were really not you know by day job musicians but who are very advanced you have in order to benefit from you have to be able to play well right because if you're like struggling with music you can you can probably benefit from from the concept but the course is geared at you know one-on-one coaching essentially with with actual music performance but uh in short-term elevated pitch it's um you know the the famous method that lee strasburg um brought really from my name's like constantine stanislavski from moscow stanislavski was a famous actor and director and all had his own theater in fact theater still is in moscow it's called

Starting point is 00:12:26 stanislavski in the merovich danchenko theater which is sort of where all the chekhov's plays right so um uh it's it's a very um profound way of looking um at crafts as an actor where you become the character right you analyze you you're you're present in that character's inner world which is fully realized 3d experience so the idea is to not pose but to live you have to um you have to understand the process so you can't just say okay i'm gonna live now and you know right so there there is a system to living if you will which is essentially self-analysis you have to analyze yourself and the world around you to understand the impulse of human behavior and human emotion understand where it comes from and then um find when you

Starting point is 00:13:22 look at the character as a method actor you ask all those questions but then you have to find sympathetic experiences in your own real self right in your actual life and most there's always a way they may not be exactly the same i mean hopefully because most of the dramatic acting has to do with some tragedy of sorts so you know one hopes that those personal experiences are not as tragic as those of those characters but there's always something you can find i mean we've all lost somebody right even if it's your cat uh right so that's already an experience of loss so you can recall that emotion and in the process of recalling that emotion it becomes true to you again you relive it and then you assign it to the character so you're able to snap into the

Starting point is 00:14:08 character who's mourning a loss of parent or a child but what you what you in reality mourning a loss of your cat from 25 years ago you're just able to be emotionally right there instantly and then you're no longer faking it right your tears aren't a put on tears you're actually crying for your cat uh i mean it's a very sort of simplistic example but you know what i mean yes there's a zillion of these things so the entire universe is woven out of it right our sensory memory you know we all know smell you know what does the air smell like in a place where you spend the night with first lover husband wife right um that can be very powerful do you remember everybody if everybody thinks about it i'm sure they will remember but just people don't think about it but you can use

Starting point is 00:14:58 it as an actor or as a musician as a storyteller right when you're playing a piece that's one of my favorite things to say to people um is just you have to contextualize your entire performance beyond just playing music and playing notes. You know, try to smell the air of the imaginary place where your character is playing the piece you're playing. And that will determine the way your sound will be, the way your breathing will be, the way your energy will flow. Darlene just put in here,

Starting point is 00:15:34 do you channel the composer when considering interpretation? Not the composer, because it's a two-edged sword. there are composers that are very autobiographical there are composers that are not and i think i mean in the system there is a it's very important to do research right so it all begins with your activation of your brain so we have to research research research and um so in order to create your own narrative for it to make any sense it has to be um it has to be tangibly within the probability of what the composer meant with to say their music right because if you're just put things completely out of context it can become absurd right so any system like this can be taken

Starting point is 00:16:20 and flipped on itself and it can become just an absurd exercise of surrealism you know you take Bach and you turn it into I don't know um a disco song right you don't want to do that unless that is the point of what you're doing that becomes performance art not the performing arts do you know what i mean right um if your if your idea is to search for the truth of the meaning of the music you're playing the research and understanding of um what composer likely was saying with that music uh will give you the initial intel from which you build right and that is actually usually determined not by reading their you know musical biography but by discovering the kind of people they were with at the time letters are very good because letters are really gossip columns of the

Starting point is 00:17:11 day right so that's where we get really dirt and everybody and but you can also get an understanding of their attitude towards people towards things so uh you know read the letters see who they were friends with see what music they were listening to what art were they uh you know surrounded by because a lot of the music is i mean all of art is actually reactionary right it's either in consort with the events or the zeitgeist of the time or against it right right that the Debussy you know the Impressionists were anti-Wagnerians well guess what what's really funny is that if you look at the Valkyrie it's basically that they asked him at his aunt I mean so Debussy's opera is so Wagnerian from orchestration to through composition of it I

Starting point is 00:17:59 mean it's really extraordinary but and yet Debussy spent his whole life you know basically flinging dirt at Wagner so those kinds of things give you clues as to what might be going on in a composer's mind but then in order for you for one to give a believable performance you have to make it yours and Stanislavski always said the moment the actor says lines he is a co-author of the play ownership of the music the moment you play anybody's music you're co-composing it but without a performer music is dead it's just a bunch of black ink on a piece of paper we bring it alive and and it's not just privilege it's a responsibility to to mean what we say and it has to have meaning to us because if you're just constantly role-playing trying to pretend that

Starting point is 00:18:51 you're an 18th century you're just a glorified undertaker you know we can't be embalming music we have to make it current we have to live in order for it to breathe it has to be live and It has to be adapted to my first century. So yes, you can create narratives that involve cars and gadgets and computers, and it's perfectly all right. And you're playing in Mozart's concerto. This is so fascinating. I feel like I have about 10 questions coming to my head.

Starting point is 00:19:20 And there's something I'm thinking about. I'll get back to this in a second. But what's interesting to me is how I haven't heard often about musicians using acting methods And I use acting methods in the Music Mastery Experience, but for a different approach. But recently, there was a podcast episode with Eli Epstein, where he was also talking about using the Stanislavski method. Do you find that at times, people, so for me, it's interesting to have, you know, two people close in, within a few weeks, having a, not similar, but you know, somewhat similar approach. and um but do you find that at times people have a hard time reconciling the emotions in the narrative with the music that they're trying to interpret well absolutely but it happens usually from not being precise enough right so i always you know i always say um you know all i do is lecture people uh but i find that the more

Starting point is 00:20:32 precise your narrative you're creating it yourself right so you're in control of the kind of emotion you're creating also so if if people are saying i'm just going to you know this is a heartbreak well that's a very broad stroke you know what is a heartbreak exactly what form does it take I mean, are you a man or a woman? The wonderful thing about this, it can be complete role playing in a sense that you can flip genders, you can be old, you can be young, because those details remain your secret, right? that's another sort of actor device is that you really never divulge that i mean obviously we do in a class in order to learn and i do in order to demonstrate to people but in in my real performance i never ever reveal my inner narrative because it can be well it can seem very um remote from the music for the audience the important thing is what it does to me so that i can interpret better

Starting point is 00:21:31 it doesn't have it doesn't have to be public knowledge so whatever you find that actually creates the right emotion and you're in control of is the right narrative not the other way around people can't control their emotions when they're really not constructing a narrative not writing a script in their mind but just going by i'm happy i'm unhappy you know i'm in love now I'm you know single right those things they have so many different ways of being that that's where you can be overwhelmed with emotions you may not know what to do and then what highly trained professionals do they default into pretty playing right you just kind of yeah like pretty music at people well you know that's that's where the audience starts

Starting point is 00:22:16 checking their email yeah absolutely and you know I love what you said at the beginning in terms of how you need to already be in control of the instrument because at times i find that an issue that some people are facing and i hope i do a good job of expressing what i'm trying to say right now is that people want to express and therefore they don't want to feel like as they're playing they're executing a bunch of different commands but at the base of things you need to know what the commands are. So you can create the crescendo or I don't play piano, but you know, you need to know what the mechanics are so that you get precisely the kind of attack that you want. So I find that people at times have a resistance to think of interpretation as also a very technical

Starting point is 00:23:14 thing. But the beauty is that you need to understand all of the technical things, then you can move on to the narrative but i find that at times people have somewhat of a resistance to really push the technical approach of being able to execute it am i making any sense absolutely look i mean i think what you're really saying is that um just like with the ballet dancing right in order to be martha rams and nuria's you know you have to do that good first right so if your body doesn't bend and if you can be airborne for 15 minutes and all those wonderful things that we associate with the top ballad and then emotions are capable of being interpreted because playing a classical instrument of any sort piano violin um at that professional level

Starting point is 00:24:05 is like an olympic sport right you have to start early and you have to do it consistently throughout your life otherwise your body just evolves without including that ability right it's it's very physical you know your ligaments are less flexible your tendons don't work you know your micro musculature and your fingers doesn't respond to brain because there is no neural pathways that have been created so um that is a prerequisite on the other hand you one can reverse engineer it say well you know if you're not aiming at being a professional then no matter what level you are if you start using this kind of approach it will make your experience of your music making that much more pleasurable that much more adventurous yeah students who are just spending hours and

Starting point is 00:24:52 hours and hours writing multiple scripts because they're into it all of a sudden like they discovered something they're discovered meaning of what they're doing yes they may not be kind of whole quality of a performance but their experience of their music making is elevated and and they're starting looking for things and thinking about things differently so that's that's the goal and for kids you know visual aids and all those things are great so if you're dealing with children i was just talking about this the other day with an educator who predominantly works with younger people and they were interested in narrative music and i said well you know mainly i deal with you know heartbreak deaths and adult you know working with grown-ups so you don't want to scare the kids

Starting point is 00:25:33 by talking about death all the time but there but on the other hand you know you can give they can create their own stories right you just give them essentially you know opportunity and and it's licensed to go and write their fairy tales and then you teach them how that can become the basis for their music playing yes oh and i love that you use the word adventurous well it has to be Look, I mean, life in music is a blessing, but it can be also incredibly boring if one isn't adventurous. I mean, just hours and hours of repeating the same things over and over again doesn't sound very exciting to me. Unless you make it so. It can be also incredible. So it's kind of in the way you approach the process.

Starting point is 00:26:18 And it's a real cycle, too, when you're adventurous, you're curious. I believe you use the word engaged as well which is a word I love when it comes to music making being engaged and then you look for new ways of interpretation you start experimenting more in the instrument and like that elevates the skills as well as the creativity is just beautiful the ultimate goal is of technique is to not think about it right so so then your ability to play your chosen instrument is such that um you think the concept and your body executes it yeah at a high level because you think oh what i do with the left finger where does the pedal go and like where am i like that's it's not you you can't go to that next level imagine if an actor

Starting point is 00:27:10 like doesn't know their lines by heart i mean would you be interested in going to rodway and seeing everybody read from the script probably not right yes against the real comedy um it's it's one of these like you have to just be prepared yeah and in in case of uh classical music it just takes years oh my god we never stop really you know learning more yeah but i'd say you know about 10 years into your music journey you if you practice right and if you have great teachers to guide you uh because there is no one fits all you know they're everybody's hands are different everybody's body is different ability coordination so in purely technical study there has to be very good and careful guidance uh rather than you know do it my way or or you're no good that rigid

Starting point is 00:28:04 approach that's why i don't like the ideas of schools in russian school german school i mean what is that you know um there's only one school good music and you know whichever way you get to make it good for you all right so um we have to be an aggregate of things you know i had russian school and german school and american school and then you know put it all together into gulabez and i'm going to the constantine school no yeah i'm sure somebody will call it that one day and fine but that's not the goal the goal is to be to have the biggest number of tools at my disposal so that I don't have to think about how to make something happen but just make it happen right yes then your attention is on envisaging what's going to happen right your imagination is working

Starting point is 00:28:54 towards emotional truth as opposed to how do I accommodate because I can't play double notes absolutely slow down here because it's getting difficult i have another 15 minutes of a piece left you know you don't want to have those things predetermine your interpretation and your way of playing absolutely this is kind of connected to a question i see here in i see syliana saying imagery is so important yes and you know in the music mastery experience one way that i use the acting method is also to address performance anxiety how we feel when we play and because feelings are created by thoughts so it is possible to put ourselves in the state that we desire before performance and some of these acting methods I find are very effective to to do that

Starting point is 00:29:48 it is possible to backstage channel joy and put yourself in the state of joyful gratitude um so anyway these are some ways that i use these acting methods um so darlene says do you recommend kind of connected to what you just said do you recommend listening to recordings before working on a new piece um yes and no good question two answers depends on you if you are um automatically uh starting to emulate what you like another there are two kinds of personalities i the ones the the inadvertent copycats as it were and uh um and uh kind of detached listeners so if you're able to listen to them and like gather intel one thing but if you immediately fall in love and it starts rubbing off on you then maybe not until after you've already created something

Starting point is 00:30:50 of your own because that's the danger of sounding like arthur rubenstein which is what i actually did when i was younger i was so obsessed with arthur rubenstein and um historical recordings but particularly rubenstein of all uh so in my early years at juilliard i just started i wasn't intentionally copying him but I was just listening to him all the time and all of a sudden everybody started telling me look you know you sound like Rubenstein which is not the worst thing on earth right yeah those were mannerisms though you know those were like a particular robot or the particular things and and I would listen to myself my recordings and I was like wait a second yeah I kind of do uh and then for a while I thought oh that's cool and then and then I realized well

Starting point is 00:31:43 i'm losing myself you know i really don't know what i want to play like because i'm just playing in a rubinstein mode do you know what i mean so yes that's a difficult uh choice to make i these days i like to not listen to when when i'm just starting to learn a piece like for instance i uh pandemic had postponed my debut performance of ron's second piano concerto something i wanted to do for many many years played myself i have heard it over the years live actually many times but uh you know that wasn't when i was learning it so i have memory of my emotional response to those performances but i'm not verbatim listening to them and so i first learned it on my on my own with my own and then implemented my my own ideas written my

Starting point is 00:32:37 own script marked up my score you know done all that work and then i started listening um and interestingly that once you do that and you listen to other people it's not that you don't like any of the other interpretations but it yours always wins that's how it should be if we constantly try to emulate our idols we carry with us on stage the perpetual inferiority complex yeah because we know we aren't as great as Rubenstein just because he was he is that um and famous do you know what I mean so if you're if you're trying to be Heifetz or you know Dmitry Khorostovsky um then you're always underperforming uh right uh when you create your own interpretation and you believe in it entirely you listen to other people you say no that's beautiful but i don't know i would do it

Starting point is 00:33:35 other otherwise and so it becomes i think more of a constructive listening uh as opposed to just looking for pins to borrow. Yes. I see another note here from Siljana. She was wondering what you think about Taubman. Taubman technique?

Starting point is 00:33:57 I think so, yes. The rotation of the wrist, is that it? I think so. Look, I think wrist has to be flexible. So, again, I don't believe in employing a technique because, frankly, everybody who is a

Starting point is 00:34:13 true absolute disciple of taubman technique develops hand problems uh too so i think there is some truth to it and it's good to incorporate into your technique some of its principles but you can't play you know prokofiev second piano concerto if you follow strictly taubman technique you just can't period because your fingers need to be like this to play to reach the kind of voice you need to reach um and so so it's custom you know everything i always say we're in business everything's bespoke there is no off the rack yes you know yeah so i'm not a pianist but in violin playing we often hear about you know the bow should be held this way or you have people who are strong proponent proponents that musician violinists

Starting point is 00:35:06 shouldn't play with a shoulder rest or other people say they shouldn't play without so i think that ultimately it goes back to what you were saying also about interpretation is how do you make it your own how do you make it work for yourself yeah but the most important thing also is health you have to be healthy so tension is number one pillar of of hand health right notice those exercise balls over there right i'm constantly doing exercises against the wall and and rolling and finding relaxations and and and um i'm working actually with a specialist to develop a particular uh body awareness and uh exercise routine that is geared at pianists because most of the stuff is um geared at people who are standing up right so but it's very

Starting point is 00:35:58 interesting because really the only thing that matters uh long uh long term is that your hands are healthy and that you have a lifetime of usage uh at high uh intensity level which means you have to relax whenever there is a tension that is built something is wrong then and it's it's multiple reasons it can be i want to guess the specifics but but you should never feel uncomfortable playing the piano or you should never feel any type of tension or uh pain and that can come from certain techniques some techniques can help but again if you stick to a very strict this is how you do it it's like everybody's like hold an apple well great if you're playing you know maybe baroque music but you can't hold an apple while playing you know rahmanian or piano concerto you can't

Starting point is 00:36:47 um so you know use the reasonable judgment and again body awareness is a very important thing We are all different proportions, right? So what is good for one person simply is opposite for somebody else because their hands-to-shoulder ratio is different. Right, yes. Josephine talked about performance, and she was wondering if you have a routine before performance, a checklist of certain things you must do to put yourself into the performance mindset.

Starting point is 00:37:22 it of course um checklist that's actually a good idea make one uh yeah i always check to make sure my fly is up it actually once i was wearing something red and black and i forgot to zip up and took a bow and so i was like oh my god they're having fun now um but seriously uh yes i do and that's where you know i've been experimenting on myself for 20 years plus with narrative musicianship so before i kind of pointed into a system i was just doing random um you know exercises and things first of all breathing is so important you know i do breathing exercise to just calm down because actually the emotion comes out of your body right so we think emotion is something that occurs in our soul but uh emotion occurs in your body so if your body sends the wrong signal

Starting point is 00:38:13 you can be thinking pleasant thoughts but if you're uh you know for instance have the wrong posture your body thinks it's being attacked so your body is actually in flight or fight mode so you can recognize thoughts but your body is doing physically opposite to you so you have to find ways to you know nap relax fully from inside out from the body and then into the mind so assuming you know there are certain i mean all the feldenkrais alexander they're all talking about same thing you know bodies can just kind of lay down and feel different parts of your body and if you can lay down you can do it standing up if you can't stand up you know you can just concentrate on feeling you know your feet your shoulders your midsection your neck uh then um

Starting point is 00:39:02 i mean i always you know i have narratives going right so i'm always kind of play acting right so i'm getting myself into the character what i'm going to do sometimes i listen to music that isn't at all what i'm going to play but something that inspires me which can range from mozart to madonna so that depends on what i'm playing um for instance when i played the prokofiev second concerto uh i call it the um rise of the machine my narrative for it is the distraction of humanity through um the industrialization in the early 20th century so i watched terminator backstage that puts me into the right frame of everything you know and i'm able to channel the horror of terminator yeah it's like for me i have a routine that before each big audition i watched the first

Starting point is 00:39:55 four rocky movies every time oh it's also i mean the oldest technique is is is um you know the personality is flip is where uh you basically impersonate your favorite movie star essentially or i mean can be musician uh you know in other words instead of feeling like you're you and you're being judged uh by somebody imagine that you're someone that is um you know in zenith of their global fame and um and everyone is just so lucky to breathe the same air in their with their presence no one's judging everybody just wants a piece of you an autograph and that gives you confidence uh to carry yourself like a star and then people if you believe that people will believe if you if you have an ounce of apology oh my god you know that's it you lost them

Starting point is 00:40:52 because then you're a student that is being adjudicated that's a good point like i was saying feelings they're all caused by thoughts that were entertaining it's kind of the easiest in a way it's maybe this overly simplistic but you know just imagine you are your idol um that that is their performance that just you're playing it but are you are you like me where i find that my pre-performance rituals they actually starts at home uh weeks before a performance with visualization and just pre-start techniques and things like this i mean look before you know time stopped a year ago you know i was doing it quite often so i mean i don't I can go, you know, into a performance state, you know, within an hour.

Starting point is 00:41:49 So, because I can't, I like to really have a life to work balance. So I don't think about performances or anything musical 24-7. I just don't think it's healthy. So, you know, I snap in and out of it. So I don't do it much in advance, but I do have, I mean, I do have ways that, uh, again, thought process, uh, techniques, inspiration is very important to me. Like I, which are usually filmed because, you know, because I act. So for me, acting is where I really get all of it. So like the day of my Lincoln Center debut, I just spent the whole

Starting point is 00:42:29 morning in bed watching The Hours because I was playing music from the film. But in order for me to embody the music, um, you know, I, I watched the whole movie. Uh, so those kinds, but you have to find them there's no absolutely unique thing you know somebody needs to eat chocolate then eat chocolate you know i don't like to eat anything because i love food and i like you know mercurial things in life so if i'm eating i want to have wine and champagne and then you know then you're really not in performance mode so i'm glad you mentioned chocolate because that's one of my thing i do as well years ago i think i came up with this um what would you call it a theory that if there's adrenaline and i eat chocolate my body is busy digesting the sugar

Starting point is 00:43:18 and i'm talking this was you know when i was in my late teens so this is a habit i've had many years but when i'm talking about pre-performance routines at home i'm talking more in the practice room not as i cook or things like this well i mean it's very important i'm always first like you always have to be warmed up so your body has to be flexible right so play the piano or you can do some stretching whatever the my worst thing is cold like if if the weather around me is cold my hands are getting cold then i really don't feel comfortable then uh you know so i always have gloves everywhere so i just make sure my hands are sort of neutrally warm and um depending to the piece you know that i'm playing usually if it's a solo show i just that's very natural

Starting point is 00:44:08 to me when i'm playing with an orchestra you know it's it's a little different and depending on a concerto you know it literally goes from you know watching terminator to uh reading the score to you know visualizing um usually i already have a narrative so i'm trying to get myself as close to the narrative the important thing I always say you know to everybody is right before your performance begins before you step on stage right it's it's when you're in the wings and um as you're standing there instead of thinking oh my god am I gonna remember everything or I'm nervous or I'm not nervous I'm joy you know you can just refocus your mind on saying who are you as a kid who is your character playing that piece who are you where are you where have you

Starting point is 00:45:00 come from why are you here and where are you going afterwards occupy yourself with those things it'll give you purpose and it will take the nervousness away and it creates in your energy a live lived because all those things they determine already 3d environment you're not you know carbon copy of a thought or idea you're an entity a living being that is has an agenda has text and subtext so everything you're playing half of it is not what it sounds like right what is it then subtext it's like the words that actors the characters are saying are never what they really mean same thing so start thinking about that then your whole body changes because you're interested you're trying to feel that you forget you're even performing so that's what i do usually

Starting point is 00:46:01 i say you know how old am i today no i'm not kidding you uh i have a lots of uh i have multiple narratives for for everything so depending on how i feel you know i have to vibe with it so in order for it to be real right so i may not always have a very stiff predetermined narrative for one piece i have variants and um based on my healing of the day um i can flip between them and then you know sometime i'm a 16 year old boy sometimes i'm a woman in her 60s sometimes you know i'm somebody who just had a breakup uh sometimes i'm i don't know pregnant uh the sky's the limit so long as you've tried to feel what what that person would feel if they were you and what that mean uh music how it relates to them right so it sounds a little

Starting point is 00:46:58 random when i give those examples yeah but but it's not actually really random because it's not just funky for the sake of being funky right there's once you have a narrative for instance like i use brahms intermezzo you know number two from uh 117 um is is when you it's it's aging right my character one thing that is consistent is that the character um begins his life um as a sort of hopeful young person you know full of excitement about things and then as they go through life their experiences dull the feelings and there is a sense then they clearly meet somebody uh because there is a duet with a imitation so you know that's where the analysis comes in right you don't want to lose that or disregard that so clearly that dramatically

Starting point is 00:47:56 introduces a second entity into that narrative so it's their partner in life whoever that is it's up to you man woman doesn't matter and um and then that meeting affects how that person experienced life up to that point because music returns but it returns differently so now you have impression of that other person on you and your personality and then you age and then there's a sense of passage of time then there's a sense of regret and then there is a so usually i age them to almost death and then the final phrases that's where i have a variant where based if i feel like killing them then i do yeah it ends really tragically but it can also end so hopefully And if I don't feel like I'm, you know, in a state where my battery went out, death of the character is the right state for today, then I don't.

Starting point is 00:49:00 Then I have this variant that I flip to and then it becomes very hopeful. It's like, you know, one door closes, the other door opens. There is a rebirth at the end as opposed to finality. I love all of the creativity that comes from doing this. I can also hear a question from, and I'm thinking of a particular person that would have this question. Do you ever feel like, do you ever show up with no narrative, just 100% Konstantin in this moment? That's a good question. No, I always have narratives.

Starting point is 00:49:43 Yeah. because look i mean first of all i'm you i've had narratives probably my whole life because you're you can script yourself me when i'm performing is not me doing dishes in the kitchen and uh do you know what i mean like you're just different uh in a different state and frame of being so it's there it's not like you're hiding from yourself by being uh in in the narrative so if if you want to narrativize yourself um absolutely i really love uh playing other characters and other roles but you know that's unfair because i've acted and i've played other characters so i know how to do it and i enjoy doing it or musicians for instance who've never

Starting point is 00:50:34 acted you know this may seem like you know kind of a distracting tall order then absolutely you can create narrative that superimpose onto you and your story and your actual actuality your feelings and your um you know life events and work with that absolutely yeah and one thing i loved as well was how you mentioned that and i'm using different words but how you're not limited by your narrative it's just a starting point of inspiration but is open to all sorts of nothing should ever be limited because the idea of a good artist is the limitless expression so uh by no means is the system supposed to put a cage over you know your your construct and say you know this is what you do the beauty of it is that it's it's no one knows right it's in your

Starting point is 00:51:35 consciousness yes your head but nobody knows it's not a program note and please don't ever really put it in program um because you may be an animal or an object uh in your narrative i mean it is possible you know how many times i played water or sun uh i mean you know if you actually tell people they'll think you're nuts so uh but if it works for you if it gives your sound warmth if you can embody some and what it means to people across millennia of history i mean that there's a lot to unpack there right there but you in fact may be channeling some so there's a lot um to be said about the fact that secret so it can evolve it can change and it's if you're look we should be ever so lucky to feel that our narratives constrict us yes usually it's the other way

Starting point is 00:52:31 around with yes uh details so i always almost without an exception every time when my students bring me the script uh of their music there are like 60 percent voids that need to be filled in yeah uh even though after they thought they had marked it up right there's never enough information so i don't think there's a i will be delighted to encounter when there is too much yeah and you know what i love about this too is that it separates us from our self-concept as renee as a person i am this way i am this way i am this way when i grant myself permission to be anyone and anything then the possibilities are endless of course and the idea is is to also get out of your own mind right get out of your own head we all have little quirks and insecurities

Starting point is 00:53:25 and if it's you you you you know you're kind of self-centered that way and um and and those things can be come into focus quite a lot you know yeah there's no one who's a super person no one has ever not not had anxieties i mean if they were saying so they were just not being honest right uh so let's you know admit that get over it celebrate it but then you know in a way i find that um you know acting um those narratives out through music is ultimate you know serving of the music because you're not serving yourself or your ego in a sense that you're doing it all because of you you kind of lose yourself in what is the authenticity of the story you're telling and that's again that goes back to research research research if your basis of your story

Starting point is 00:54:23 is really off then this entire construct is a house of cards because you're building it on the wrong foundation it has to be tangibly probable as far as what composer meant and what composer's impulse to compulsive music would be about then all of this will enrich it and serve the purpose of that composer but if if if the whole thing is not organic then it can get you know pretty weird there's i see another question here and then i'm gonna have to go very soon but when you aren't certain about your interpretation do you experiment with different characters but i think you've answered this question yeah i i'm you know currently working on something and i'm not certain yet so i just keep doing it until it's right and then you know when it's right

Starting point is 00:55:14 research you're talking about right right and also in trial and error you know just play it from a different spot uh you know how many times i played something as though i'm seducing somebody and then it doesn't work and then okay i'm going to play it as though i am being seduced by somebody from the outside or or am i am i a child or am i grown up you know just that can take hours you know in the moment where the hair on the back of your neck starts standing up and you have uncontrollable tears going down your face that's when it's working and i have spent many hours silently weeping here so i know and this is not bragging but that's my check like if i am uncontrollably moved by what i'm hearing that means i'm getting it constantine this is so amazing and i really

Starting point is 00:56:06 hope that you and i see each other soon very very soon before i let you go i would love for you to give us a quick actionable tip that we could implement today in our musical lives well this actually uh grows out of what i mentioned earlier right before you play um determine determine who you are meaning as a protagonist is this music are you are you somebody who who who's bringing peace or war are you after something or or are you um responding reacting to something right so those things are usually uh very important determining determining factors for the energy of how you start right uh of your music and then um another thing is uh feel your environment like is it winter or spring uh is the air warm and do you feel it on your skin

Starting point is 00:57:03 or or is it cold and you have big fur color and you you can see vapor coming out of your you know air when you exhale those details as unrelated seemingly unrelated as they are will immediately put you in the scene of where the music should begin and i mean i use that all the time never just sort of say oh i'm on the station i have to start playing never start playing the playing is a sound manifestation of living that's already happening right music is already sounding if you just think about it i usually do that before i start don't begin at the beginning hear the first two bars in your imagination as you're sitting there on stage about to begin playing and then start breathing in that tempo and enter as though you're joining

Starting point is 00:57:53 that inner sound that you're visualizing then the entrance will be just so organic it'll come out of something it'll be meaningful i love this constantine you've just given me and i'm sure many other people here food for thoughts and inspiration for weeks to come and so great i would love for us to have many more hours to discuss all of this. I'm so grateful that you took the time to come and sit with me this morning. And it's so wonderful to see you. My pleasure. It's wonderful to see you. And thank you all for watching. Yeah. Bye, everyone. Thanks for being here. Bye. thank you guys so much for listening i hope you enjoyed this tribe q a session my guest and i would love to know what your favorite takeaways from today's conversation were so get in touch

Starting point is 00:58:54 with us and share your thoughts on those topics as always i'll have all the information related to this episode in the show notes, including everything about my guest. You can find them via your podcast app or by visiting mindoverfinger.com, where you can also find more information about mindful and efficient practice, performance preparation, and how to work with me. While you're there, sign up for my newsletter and receive your free guide to a highly productive and mindful practice using the metronome. Depending on when you're listening to this episode, I hope you can join us for the upcoming sessions. As I said in the intro, all the information is in the tribe at facebook.com slash groups slash mind over finger tribe. So send in your questions and tune

Starting point is 00:59:43 in to be part of the live conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a friend that you think could benefit from the wisdom of my guest. And also, why not share on social media. Don't forget to tag me, I'm Mind Over Finger, on both Facebook and Instagram. So that's it for today. Again, thank you, and à bientôt.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 101 Konstantin Soukhovetski: Tribe Q&A Session

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.