Besides teaching at New England Conservatory, I also have recently had the good fortune to create two new collaborative piano programs: A Master of Music in Collaborative Piano at California State University Northridge, and a summer fellowship program at the Bowdoin International Music Festival in Maine. At all three institutions, we admit talented pianists with solid pianistic skills and with a real passion for making music with others—the two most necessary ingredients to begin the journey. In addition to facing a huge new repertoire, the biggest challenge for most entering a collaborative program is the sudden need to accelerate their learning speed and hone their time management skills. Their partners pull them in different directions every day. They are always performing, and on a daily basis need to be prepared for rehearsals, lessons, repertoire classes, concerts, and studio classes. Interactive skills are also new to some who have spent most of their musical lives alone in a piano practice room, and the musical and interpersonal give and take, learning to make someone else’s interpretive ideas work, are skills that only experience can teach.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/new-england-conservatory-/the-indispensable-pianist_b_12304472.html
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