Helping hands.

One day, two years ago, buoyed by the thought of a few successful performances at retirement homes, I applied for a grant to do community outreach performances with my piano studio at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My proposal, like most proposals, was a fantasy item. I wanted a grad assistant; I said that we would travel all over the state; I claimed that we'd find collaborators across the university. And most daringly of all, I maintained that my students would actually like all the extra work these concerts entailed and come begging for more.

This story has a happy ending. It all came true, and my guess is that the same could happen, with possible tailor-made modifications, at many colleges and universities, and in many private studios as well.

THE GAME PLAN

On the theory that concerts would be more fun for both my students and their audiences if they involved non-musicians, I spent the summer of 2005 contacting colleagues at the university and in the community for possible collaborations. My task was by no means easy--UW-Madison is a big place, and most people who teach here don't see gigs with piano students as their highest priority. On the other hand, that means that the people who did respond were super-good folks, and soon I was up and rolling. We found a theater coach who agreed to recruit actors, a dancer who was eager to do choreography and an English professor interested in comparing musical and literary versions of the avant-garde. We discovered that we had ballroom dancers within our very own studio, and we investigated academic collaborations that would involve our double majors in piano/physics and piano/East Asian studies. We were even lucky enough to find a community music store willing to move 6-foot grand pianos wherever we needed them for no rental fee whatsoever and a vastly reduced moving fee.

OUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS

A motley but delightful mix of events resulted, and now that we've had a year to dream, an even more motley mix is in the making. So far, we've presented:

A wonderful rendition of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, performed in its entirety by three of nay students and punctuated by excerpts from Shakespeare acted by five theater students. All of a sudden titles like "Montagues and Capulets," "Friar Laurence" and "Mercutio" became more than words to type on a program. They were accompanied by unforgettable text, and the power of both music and words fueled performers on both sides of the piano.

A choreographed version of Schoenberg, Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, of all things--five dancers, two pianists and costumes all around. The emotional intensity of the music, its counterpoint, its jagged lines all ricocheted across the stage, reminding us of Schoenberg's force and lessening his severity.

Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals in its delightful four-hand version, presented by 16 pianists (my entire studio) and two splendid narrators, whose rendition of the Ogden Nash narration seemed more hilarious each time I heard it. Nash reports on The Fossil: "Cheerup, sad world, he said, and winked--It's kind of fun to be extinct." And describes the elephant: "Elephants are useful friends/Equipped with handles at both ends./ they have a wrinkled, moth-proof hide;/their teeth are upside down, outside./If you think the elephant preposterous/You've probably never seen a rhinosterous." A pleasure to encounter rocks and beasts amongst all us pianists for a change!

The Dancing Piano--A ballroom dancing blowout. How many waltzes and other dances have we all encountered in our piano playing lives? But ask us to dance one, and we'll soon be under the piano rather than on the dance floor. In this program we gathered together waltzes, polkas and tangos, recruited four dancers (including two of our own pianists) and then showed the audience how the pieces really went. We found all sorts of splendid literature we might otherwise have missed--Rachmaninoff's Italian Polka for Four Hands and his Valse for One Piano/Six Hands, Stravinsky's Tango, and polkas by Gottschalk and Shostakovitch. We can't wait to repeat this concert with a whole different assortment of dances, and we'd like to get the audience onto the dance floor as well.

Satie's Parade--our most ambitious undertaking so far. I was accused of Tom Sawyer-like tendencies here, for I recruited so many helpers that it was no longer clear that music was the central activity or that I was in charge. And that was as it should be. Satie collaborated on Parade with Cocteau, Picasso and Diaghelev. Each played a crucial role, and in our production too, the dance, art and plot were center stage. Students produced costumes in Picasso-like designs, and Picasso's stunning curtain was projected in a large PowerPoint image. Dancers conveyed the carnival plot, with "managers" recruiting passers-by to come in and see the (non-existent) show. And hard-working English-literature students became dramaturges, researching the history of the original 1917 production and providing the audience with an introduction, program notes and an informative question-answer session. Eight of my students paired up in duet teams. We borrowed sirens and multiple noisemakers from the percussion studio; we placed irate Frenchmen in the audience to blast the production a la 1917; and we donned Chinese acrobat costumes, French berets and clown wigs. A far cry from Chopin Etudes, but not a bad reminder that music can be relaxing even in the week before juries. Why does what we do always have to be hard?

We did other shows too. Imagine that--conceiving of a classical concert as a show--no tuxes or expensive tickets, just entertainment. For one performance we decided to tell our audience about Beethoven. The topic appeared simplistic, but the truth is, it's only simple if you know it already. My students didn't, and neither did their audience. A communication arts major served as our narrator and researcher, and students provided the musical examples. All the struggle, angst and sheer obstinacy were right there out in the open to hear, and both performers and listeners benefited from making the connections. Both man and music shake their fist at the world, and we showed Beethoven coping, first through the humor in Op. 31, No. 3, then through the heroism of Op. 57 and finally with the serenity of Op. 109.

We played all this music for people who had plenty to cope with themselves. The Beethoven concert took place at a prison. Saint-Saens was premiered at a homeless shelter. Other concerts took place at urban schools, hospitals and senior centers. To our amazement, though all our audiences were appreciative, the prisoners won hands down when it came to involvement and enthusiasm. Their choir rehearsed for weeks ahead of time to perform for us and make the concert reciprocal, and we left stunned at how much people with such different backgrounds and lives could have in common.

Our project this past year was only the faintest of beginnings when it comes to making a mark on our school and our community. Still, I think we've achieved a lot. My students have learned that concerts can be fun instead of terrifying and that audiences don't all give grades. They've experienced the pleasures of playing together, we've spawned two lasting duo teams, and the studio exhibits the sort of unity that could only emerge from shared travels and travails. I think we've gone a ways, too, in countering the piano isolation-ward disease that's endemic in every music school. All of a sudden, instead of interacting only with their metronome and practicing piano for hours, days and years on end, students find themselves playing for and with each other, rehearsing with actors and dancers and reaching out to a community that extends way, way beyond the confines of our school's recital hall. The grins on the faces of elementary school children who'd studied Saint-Saens's animals and then met them live, the sophisticated questions of the prisoners about Beethoven's music; the plea at the senior citizen's center that Parade be performed twice in a row--all these encounters have made the power of music a concrete reality for students whose relation to the piano has all too often been more about fingers than about music. All of a sudden what's counted is communication, and all the dotted-rhythm practice in the world won't make that take place.

FUTURE PLANS

What lies ahead? Hopefully, more and more expert communication will ensue. I hope my students will learn to play out and reach out and speak out--that they will practice explaining what it is they do and why they do it, and while doing so, will understand far better why it is they grapple daily with the minutia that make up playing the piano.

So we'll continue to play and talk. Even as I've been writing this article, encouragement has been flowing in. We were invited to perform for the Madison Retirement Luncheon next fall. An elementary school student wrote to us, saying our concert "was fun and cool and I loved it!" We got a note from a prisoner saying "I would like to thank you for the first and only piano concert recital I've ever experienced. It was one of the most enjoyable moments of my life." We're planning like mad.

In fact, forgive the pun; madness is a place we want to go. We're planning a session with medical history students about Robert Schumann and his mental illness. How was his ailment diagnosed? How was it treated? How would it be treated today? Would Schumann on Prozac mean no Schumann at all or an even better Schumann? How did the the state of medicine in 19th-century Germany and Austria impact music? And then we're fantasizing about a session on jazz and improvisation, where we may even try our hand at providing music for silent film. We'll have a workshop with a master improviser to acquire some skills, and we'll also study and perform the works of composers like Stravinsky, Copland and Gershwin, who found jazz irresistibly seductive. Then maybe a concert comparing Bach and computer-generated Bach. How close can the computer get to the real thing? What gets programmed in to make it similar--and in the end, will we always be able to tell the difference? Our physics/piano double major will run this show.

We've also been asked to do a session on music and gender at a university conference on women in science. Lawrence Summers, here we come. Who were these brave women who tried to compose 100 years before anyone thought their chromosomes allowed it? One might note that the current views of Harvard's president on women in science [as stated at the 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on "Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and Their S & E Careers] are similar to those of 19th-century "experts" on women composers. Music critic, George Upton opined in 1880 that while woman "will always be the recipient and interpreter ... there is little hope she will be the creator." She was to be forever hampered by "the peculiar organization of woman." Hmm--lucky our organization seems to have improved.

The possibilities are truly endless. I'd like to do Grieg's Peer Gynt and Copland's Our Town with my theater colleague and Barber's Souvenirs with my dancers. I'd like to do an evening of Satie and recitation and a pairing of Schoenberg's works and Kandinsky's paintings. I hope my grant is continually renewed, and I think it will be. What we're doing helps the university serve its community, leads to collaboration among departments, reaches out to alumni and teaches students to be performers, teachers and caring individuals. Most importantly, the audiences are sitting and waiting. In fact, many of them are quite literally unable to do anything but sit and wait. What a privilege to come into their spaces and make a difference.

Catherine Kautsky is professor of music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and chair of the keyboard area. She has concertized throughout the United States and abroad as a recitalist, soloist with orchestra and chamber musician. Kautsky is known for her articles and lecture-recitals on music and its intersection with the other arts.