Alan Feinberg Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Pianist Alan Feinberg

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Alan Feinberg (born June 15, 1950 in New York City) is an American classical pianist who has forged a remarkable career based on musical exploration. His intelligence, integrity, and affinity for an unusually wide range of repertoire place him among the few artists who are able to build a bridge between the past and the present. He has premiered over 300 works by such composers as John Adams, Milton Babbitt, John Harbison, Charles Ives, Steve Reich, and Charles Wuorinen, as well as the premiere of Mel Powell's Pulitzer Prize winning Duplicates [recording shown below-left]. He is an experienced performer of both classical and contemporary music and is well known for recitals that pair old and new music.

Feinberg received his Bachelor of Music in 1972 and his Master of Music in 1973 from The Juilliard School in New York City with the piano professor Mieczyslaw Munz. He began D.M.A. studies and worked with Robert Helps at the Manhattan School of Music.

Feinberg toured several times with The Cleveland Orchestra and Christoph von Dohnanyi, first performing Shulamit Ran's Concert Piece (including an appearance in Carnegie Hall). He also performed the Brahms Second Piano Concerto on tour with The Cleveland Orchestra and participated in a collaboration with The Cleveland Orchestra which featured the world premiere of the recently discovered Emerson Concerto by composer Charles Ives (performed also in London, Paris, and Amsterdam), and subsequently recorded the work.

Feinberg has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the London Philharmonia, the Montreal Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish, the American Symphony Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the New World Symphony, and many others. Feinberg has also performed many times abroad. He has appeared as a concerto soloist at The Proms in England, with the Cleveland Orchestra in Paris, with the Amsterdam Radio Orchestra in Holland, with the Montreal Symphony, and with the various BBC orchestras. He has given recitals at Wigmore Hall in London, appeared at festivals in Edinburgh, Bath, Huddersfield, Geneva, Budapest, Berlin, Brescia, Bergamo, and Tokyo. He was also the first pianist to have been invited by the Union of Soviet Composers to represent American contemporary music, an invitation which resulted in performances in both Moscow and Leningrad.

Recital programs have highlighted his interest in bridging the old and the new. These include a program of Bach and Ustvolskaya, "Reconsidering Haydn" (works of Haydn, Schubert, Weir and Kagel), "Basically Bull", a program featuring works of John Bull, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Morley, and Charles Wuorinen. In recent years Mr. Feinberg has taken on work as a programmer and presenter. He has been the Artistic Advisor for the "Chautauqua Days" Festival in Castine, Maine, and Music Director of the Monadnock Music Festival. He has acted as a programming consultant for the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society's American festival. He has put together programs of American music with himself and other American performers for the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg and for a series of four concerts in Moscow.

Feinberg has recorded four solo CDs for London/Decca that survey American music: The American Romantic, The American Virtuoso, The American Innovator, and Fascinatin' Rhythm—American Syncopation. He has received Grammy Nominations for recordings of the Babbitt "Piano Concerto" (New World Records), Morton Feldman's "Palais di Mari", and Charles Wuorinen's "Capriccio", "Bagatelle", and "Third Sonata". He has additionally recorded piano concertos by Mel Powell, Andrew Imbrie, Kamran Ince, Paul Bowles, Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Leo Ornstein, Samuel Adler, Don Gilles, and Robert Helps, as well as a Decca CD of vocal works of Charles Ives with soprano Susan Narucki and Morton Feldman's "Piano and Orchestra with Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony. He received his fourth Grammy nomination for "Best Instrumentalist with Orchestra" for his recording of the Amy Beach "Piano Concerto" with the Nashville Symphony (Naxos).

Feinberg also has considerable experience as a teacher, and has taught at SUNY Buffalo, The Juilliard School, Eastman School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, and Princeton Universities.

== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

Producing and announcing a long series of programs featuring new music on WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago, several of the recordings by Alan Feinberg were played. So, in February of 1992, when the pianist was in town, I arranged to meet him. He graciously agreed to speak about many musical topics, and portions were then used on several subsequent broadcasts. Now [2024], I am pleased to present the entire conversation.

Bruce Duffie:   Let’s start off by talking about contemporary works. Why is it that so few performers play new music?

Alan Feinberg:   That’s a good question, and not one that’s got an easy answer. Part of it has to do with the educational system that produces musicians in this country, and the different agendas that the educational system has. Part of it has to do with economics. Obviously, people who play standard repertoire exclusively make more money. They have more opportunities than people who play new music, and the pay for new music concerts is considerably less. The funding for new music concerts is very often government-dependent in some form and another, and as we all know, that has been going in a rather downward direction.

BD:   How can we get this to change, or should we try to get it to change?

Feinberg: We should get it to change, but how is a complicated question. My own feeling is that as we are coming to the end of the century things will change, not because a decision has been made that things are going to change, but that the tide of history will make itself felt. What’s going to happen is a lot of these standard stereotype images that musicians have of what they’re going to do, and why they go into music, and what kinds of careers are going to be there for them, are not going to be there. So out of necessity, people will start to think about doing other things.

BD:   If the careers not going to be there, is there going to be less music played?

Feinberg: There already is. There are considerably fewer recitals every year.

BD:   But record sales are up, and concert attendance in general seems to be up.

Feinberg: No, I don’t think that’s true, actually. Most places are having trouble.

BD:   Maybe I’m spoiled by being here in Chicago. Our concert scene is pretty good.

Feinberg: I’m not from Chicago so I don’t know. But the question is, what are you talking about when you speak about the audience? Are you talking about the people who go to the opera, or the people who go to the orchestra, or the people that go to recitals?

BD:   Yes, all of that in aggregate. [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interview with Richard Goode.]

Feinberg: Record sales are good, but have you looked at which records are selling?

BD:   No, again I’m looking at a big picture. I’m not looking at the specifics.

Feinberg: The big picture is not really great. I can’t see any reason to be very sanguine about things. Most recital series are having trouble these years, and many of them have closed down.

BD:   Solo recitals, yes. But the record sales in general, even for recitalists, seem to be up, and the attendance in the opera and symphony seems to be up as well.

Feinberg: I don’t think that’s true about record sales. Pavarotti sells, and the kinds of ‘Pachelbel Canon-type’ records sell.

BD:   But there are always new records of this, that, and the other thing, and the record companies wouldn’t put them out if they lost money.

Feinberg: [Emphatically] Au contraire!

BD:   [Laughs] Okay... I always thought record companies were in business to make money.

Feinberg: No, I don’t think there’s any way to substantiate what you’re saying. In fact, most of the big record companies now are all worried because they cannot sell another Beethoven Fifth Symphony. If you look at the numbers of actual discs sold, or the numbers that are printed, or the numbers that are imported into the United States from some of the foreign companies, from the European companies, they’re pitifully small. They don’t cover the cost of anything.

BD:   [With a sigh and a wink] You’re a real downer, aren’t you?

Feinberg: [Smiles] No, I’m a realist. Frankly, if you’re trying to make your way in the business, you have to be a realist.

BD:   I understand all of this, and specifically with piano I know things are very tight.

Feinberg: Very tight, yes, and things that have been successful for years, like string quartets that had quite a bonanza for a while, are starting to slow down now. There are too many string quartets in the pipeline.

BD:   Are we oversaturated?

Feinberg: Yes.

BD:   Okay, so let’s come back to new music. How do we encourage either more listening to new music, or playing of new music, or both?

Feinberg: The long-term way to encourage it is partly through education. But now we’re talking about a situation where increasingly people are talking about cutting yet more and more funding for the arts and music in the public schools. In certain parts of the country, there have already been drastic cutbacks in music education.

BD:   So, we have to rely on either volunteers or home-life?

Feinberg: Or basically nothing! For example, in California, after Proposition 13, kids went from kindergarten through high school without a music class, and without sitting down and singing a song together. Then, do you want them to go and listen to György Ligeti or Milton Babbitt???

BD:   Better to start with Debussy, and then move to Ligeti.

Feinberg: It’s a very complicated question. If the public is going to listen to more new music, the professionals who play music have to play more new music, and there’s a lot of resistance to that. But this will change because people will find that they can’t make careers doing the things that people have been doing for the last couple of decades.

BD:   So, they’ll reluctantly pick up pieces by Babbitt and Ligeti?

Feinberg: I’m not saying who they’ll pick up. The truth of the matter is that nowadays you can find new music of any style. You can find tonal music, romantic music, minimal music, and even a couple of dinosaurs who are still writing serial music! But the interesting part of the message is that new music is no longer this kind of thing that people perceived it to be, which was monolithically ugly and difficult and complex, whether it was of the experimentalist or the academic variety.

BD:   [Being hopeful] But sometimes they might like it?

Feinberg: Yes. There’s a lot of stuff that one would call ‘accessible’ now, and there’s a lot of accessible stuff that is high quality stuff as well. ‘Accessible’ and ‘high quality’ are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms.

BD:   Do they intersect sometimes?

Feinberg: They do.

BD:   Is this what you look for, something that intersects those values?

Feinberg: I look for things that interest me.

BD:   You have recorded Babbitt and Ligeti, which are among the toughest to get into.

Feinberg: Right. I’ve also recorded John Adams and Philip Glass, so I have fairly catholic tastes. I hope that what will happen will be that more and more people will try to forge connections with others of their own generation, and that they will start to think more about doing a variety of things, and doing things that seem somehow a little more relevant to society than just playing what has become the Classical Top Forty.

BD:   On your concerts, are you sure to include both Glass and Babbitt, just to name the outer edges?

Feinberg: It really depends on what the concert is, what the venue is, and what’s appropriate. My own predilection at the moment is for not segregating new music and old music, but programming both together in a way that makes sense to me.

BD:   To show a line between them?

Feinberg: Not necessarily a line... To be honest, I put things together because I like the way they sound. [Both laugh] The first recording I made for Argo, The American Romantic [shown at right] has Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Amy Beach, and Robert Helps. It has pieces from the 1850s to just a couple of years ago [1990]. By all normal dictates of the record business, this is a record that should not have been made. For one thing, it had more than two composers, which means there’s resistance to stocking it in the stores. Another thing was that there’s no particular historical connection between Amy Beach and Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Robert Helps. They spanned a huge number of years. I put it together because I felt there were musical and pianistic links between the pieces, and putting these pieces together made each one of them speak a little bit more eloquently. That was my interest.

BD:   Obviously, they would have preferred if you had done more Beach and Gottschalk and nothing else?

Feinberg: Either that, or because of all the Gottschalk that I did which had not been recorded before, I was asked to do an all-Gottschalk disc. But I really didn’t want to do that. They took a real flyer on me by letting me do it my way. They let me call the shots, and it’s been very successful. It’s sold well, and it got me a Grammy nomination.

BD:   Did the people who bought the record buy it for the Gottschalk and the Beach, and then get used to the Helps?

Feinberg: I’m not sure what happened. It did get a lot of good reviews, which helped the sales, and it got a lot of air-play. There are some very gorgeous pieces on the record, and that attracted people. The feedback I’ve gotten has been successful. I really tried to design it as a disc that you put it on, and can listen through the whole thing. It has a shape. Actually, the shape kind of mirrors the shape of the individual pieces.

BD:   One just starts it and plays it, and seventy-three minutes later they’ve heard it all?

Feinberg: Yes. It can be satisfying that way, as opposed to just listening to a piece here or a piece there. Although there are strong pianistic links between the pieces, some pieces are atonal and some pieces are tonal. But it’s done in such a way that no one seems bugged by the fact that the music veers off in different directions and in certain kinds of ways harmonically.

BD:   It’s The American Romantic, so you’re really stretching things a little bit with some of the Helps pieces.

Feinberg: Well, it depends on what your definition is. It wasn’t a historical time period I was talking about. It’s something about the piano playing. My own feeling is that one of the reasons that the disc has been successful, and one of the things that I like about it, is that it’s a very personal disc. It says something about the way I hear music, and the way I hear different music, and the way I process them. It’s not the way other people do it, and it’s not that it should be the way other people do it.

BD:   It’s your disc, so it should reflect you.

Feinberg: Yes, and there are many, many discs and many, many recitals that don’t reflect the individual that well. They’re the same discs and the same pairings as everybody else makes.

BD:   They reflect a marketing strategy?

Feinberg: They reflect a marketing strategy, and although I can understand making a set of Chopin Nocturnes, the last thing I want to do is listen to seventeen nocturnes in a row, because you lose what’s special about each of the pieces that way.

BD: Would you ever play seventeen nocturnes in a concert?

Feinberg: No!

BD: Is it conceivable that at some point you could play a concert the way that The American Romantic disc is set up?

Feinberg: I actually wouldn’t, because I designed the disc to be a disc. I do a lot of the music from that disc, and the succeeding discs, in different programs. I have a little package that I’ve been doing called Discover America, which is three concert programs that have the names of the three discs. They have shared some of the music, but they are still quite different because they’re designed for live events. They’re designed to have a different kind of shape, and a different kind of roller coaster ride.

* * * * *

BD:   Let’s explore this just a little bit. How is a live concert different from a flat disc performance?

Feinberg: [Thinks a moment] In terms of these programs, and how they relate to the discs, there’s more variety. There’s a bigger roller coaster to ride, so to speak. Each of the discs is organized a little bit differently. The discs are organized around concepts, so they’re all easy to talk about. One disc is called The American Innovator, and it was a very difficult disc to organize because, by definition, everybody’s different from everybody else. Yet, when I finally made the choice of the music, there were threads that ran through it, so I still felt you wouldn’t feel like you were having your head in the middle of a ping-pong game! [Both laugh]

BD:   The pieces all get along together?

Feinberg: There’s that to some degree, but that’s a different organizing principle than The American Romantic.

BD:   Innovator is number two?

Feinberg: Innovator is number three, and it’s coming out this spring. Number two is called The American Virtuoso, which has some of the same composers, but the focus of the disc is a little bit different. It’s on virtuosity, and it’s also a bit of a portrait of the kinds of music that these composer-pianists had in their repertoire. So it’s slightly different.

See my interviews with Mario Davidovsky, Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage, and Ralph Shapey

BD:   Do you do any composing yourself?

Feinberg: Ah, no!

BD:   Do you feel you’re shortchanging either yourself or the public by not doing a little composing, to be a composer-pianist rather than just a pianist?

Feinberg: Not at the moment! [Laughs] I have my hands full. One of the ongoing projects is Discover America. These are concert packages in which I have an ongoing commissioning project. It’s something I have wanted to do a long time, and finally got it going. The concerts are supposed to shed some light about American music. I also thought that if I’m going to use that Discover America logo, this should introduce some young composers. So there are about a dozen young composers that I’ve asked to write etudes.

BD:   What advice do you have either for those, or other composers, about writing music for the piano these days?

Feinberg: One of the reasons I picked an etude, instead of a different form, was because I felt that it was important for people to really concentrate on the physicality of playing the piano, and not just to write a short score that happened to be for the piano, or a percussion piece that gets played on the piano, as a lot of music that’s been written in the last twenty years has been. Also, if pieces are satisfyingly written for the instrument, and if there’s something about the physicality and the sense of the sound of the instrument which is well thought of as a physical thing by the composer, more pianists will want to play it because it will be more satisfying to them!

BD:   Then will more audiences want to hear it?

Feinberg: If they’re good pieces, sure!

BD:   I assume you want to help the clamor for new pieces amongst the public.

Feinberg: [Thinks a moment] Yes, I’d like to see the clamor, but what I have been finding in the programs where there is a good mix of new and old, is a formula that works, because somehow the distinction between the new and the old doesn’t seem to be affecting the audience. They’re just taking it all in as music. It’s almost all unfamiliar music. Some of it is very accessible, and some of it is not, whereas it all sounds like new music.

BD:   That makes it sound like a pejorative phrase.

Feinberg: To a lot of general audiences, that’s their idea. But they come to the concerts, and they have a good time. They’ve heard about living composers, and in places where I’ve done a couple of the concerts, they’ve even come back! [Both laugh] That’s the way it should be. I don’t think it should be a moral imperative to people. A concert, especially a recital, should be a good time. That’s the bottom line.
feinberg

BD:   Then where’s the balance between the entertainment and the artistic achievement?

Feinberg: It’s up to the program to provide that, and hopefully the execution as well. But this is something that is going to happen more and more because these programs are very personal. I’m not calling any of these programs A Historical Survey of American Piano Music. They tend to be pieces that either have been written for me, or that I feel like I’ve gone to the library to rediscover. So they’re not hitting all the big names in American piano music.

BD:   This is the slice you’ve found for today?

Feinberg: Yes. This is what’s been interesting me at this point. I got excited about this, and I’d really like you to hear it! In that context, that seems to be a good way to introduce old pieces and new pieces, and just have it all be the same in terms of the experience of the concert. I’ve become very dubious about the notion of playing a Mozart sonata, a Beethoven sonata, a little Chopin, a new piece, and some Ravel, or the top forty-type standard repertoire with one new piece shoved in because right now that just becomes medicine. People who won’t come to those kinds of concerts are not looking for a new experience, or having it shoved in there. That’s not a situation that works. I play the standard top forty as well, and I love playing those pieces, but I feel more and more strongly that if I’m going to play them, I want to put them in a personal context, and if I’m going to play well-known masterpieces with new music, it’s very important how the program works.

BD:   How it’s set up, and how it all joins together?

Feinberg: Yes, and that’s going to become more and more the trend, because if recitals don’t die out completely, they will have to become more personal affairs. That was the original attraction of recitals, and the fact that recitals are down while chamber music is up, is actually an interesting indicator of the fact that somehow the recitals are not giving the same kind of excitement that they used to.

BD:   I assume they could?

Feinberg: Oh, sure they can! This year at the university there were five pianists on the series. Three of them played Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, and I was the fifth. The fourth one had wanted to, and finally the presenter put his foot down. It’s typical for each musician to think he or she has a vision of the work that’s different from the next guy’s. But for the general audience, it’s not that different. When one picks his pedal up in measure four, and I pick it up in measure five, it’s not such a big deal, especially if the programs are otherwise similar. [Much laughter] For the general audience, that doesn’t become a personal statement if it’s just the same pieces recycled in the same season without some real fresh slant on it, and not just that somebody does something a little bit different, or their tempo is five points different on the metronome.

* * * * *

BD:   It must take a little time to get used to each new piano. Do you have to approach the instrument any differently because you’ve got some new, or all new pieces in the repertoire, as opposed to just Mozart, Liszt, and Beethoven?

Feinberg: No, I wouldn’t say so. The wider the range of repertoire or historical period you do, the bigger palette you’ll need for the instrument.

BD:   [Gently protesting] But piano music, is piano music, is piano music.

Feinberg: Physically playing the piano is playing the piano, and the reality of adjusting from piano to piano is that you work with what you’ve got. [Laughs] You don’t have any choice!

BD:   When you come to a new city, how long does it take before that piano is yours?

Feinberg: It depends on what shape the piano is in. There are pianos that don’t ever feel as well as mine, and occasionally you come across ones that are really gorgeous, and you feel at home right away.

BD:   Is it safe to say that the bigger cities and the bigger markets have the better pianos, or is that not always the case?

Feinberg: That’s not always the case. It’s very variable.

BD:   There might be a nice piano in a very small town?

Feinberg: Yes, and there may happen to be a very good technician there.

BD:   How important to you is the piano technician? [See my interview with Franz Mohr, chief concert technician for Steinway & Sons, 1968-92.]

Feinberg: It can be devastating when you have a piano that’s badly taken care of, because if the piano physically can’t do what you can do, then you’re in trouble. I played three recitals on a piano this year where there were two different technicians.

BD:   Three recitals in three days, or three recitals in five months?

Feinberg: Three recitals in three days, but there was a different technician by the third day. I had a lot of trouble with the piano the first two days. It was extremely frustrating, annoying, and difficult to play. When the new technician came in on the third day, she made a comment to the presenter, “How can anybody play this piano???” The springs were bent the wrong way, so there was no repetition, and there was too much graphite put in to try to compensate, which only meant that you couldn’t play softly. You really are at the mercy of the what the instrument can do.

BD:   Did she straighten it out?

Feinberg: She made it reasonable. [Laughs] It would have taken her days to straighten it out.

BD:   When you’re coming back to this particular town, do you make sure you ask for her, and make sure she’s there?

Feinberg: If I can! [Both laugh]

BD:   Is there kind of a pianists’ grapevine, so that you know to ask for so and so?

Feinberg: I don’t know about that. I try to keep in mind that there are normative things that the piano should be able to do. Then there are the things that you may like personally that it should do, and those vary from pianist to pianist, from technique to technique, and from repertoire to repertoire. What you need on a piano that plays Mozart is not necessarily what you need on a piano that plays Babbitt. Technicians don’t always agree, and, Lord knows, pianists don’t always agree about what they want.

BD:   If you were a millionaire, would you travel not only with your own piano, but also with your own technician?

Feinberg: Oh, yes. That’s what people used to do, and there are a few people who do it today.

BD:   [Genuinely surprised] Really???

Feinberg: Pollini does, and a couple of other people. Then there are some pianists who try to figure out how to take care of the pianos themselves, which sometimes is a disaster. I say that, having played on a piano the night after a pianist decided to redo it. [Much laughter]

BD:   I would think that would be simply too much to be your own technician.

Feinberg: It’s not wise, yet it’s important to know enough so you can talk to a technician, because there are also some funny illusions. On a piano that’s out of tune and is then tuned, it can be perceived that the action has changed when nothing has changed but the tuning. Just that aural change can make you feel that the action’s heavier, or it’s lighter, or it’s this or that.

BD:   It takes more in your right hand to get the same kind of tone out of it?

Feinberg: You may feel that, or very often when it’s in tune you may feel that it’s easier to play. But it’s no easier to play. It’s exactly the same. Nothing may have been touched in the action. There are also some funny things where it’s helpful for you to know where your description of perceptions can be wrong.

BD:   [This next question is understandable when you know that it was asked by an old bassoon player] Is it safe to say that if it’s not quite in tune, you’re working a little harder subconsciously in hopes that it will get into tune?

Feinberg: I don’t think you can do anything to make it more in tune, but your sense of the regulation may feel different. That’s what I meant. There are things you can be saying which are true, but you might be attributing them to the wrong thing because you don’t understand the mechanics. If you understand something about the mechanics, then you can be more helpful. Tuners love to tell stories where people ask them to do one thing, and they do something completely different, and the pianist says, “You did it!” Of course, they didn’t do it, but it doesn’t matter because they translated what the pianist actually wanted.

BD:   So the technician should try to make the pianist happy?

Feinberg: Within the standard norms, because some people want to start pushing the pianos past what are standard norms. If you push a note down without the pedal, and you just hold the note down, there should be at least several seconds where the note is still audible. If it dies in two seconds, that’s not normal. If it stays for ten seconds, that’s becoming rather amazing, [both laugh] and could be wonderful, but it may not be what everybody wants.

BD:   Might there be a certain note that just rings out into the house?

Feinberg: Maybe if you have a spectacular soundboard, or something...

BD:   Can you take into account the acoustics of the house?

Feinberg: Oh, you have to!

BD:   If the technician tries to please you, who do you try to please? Is it the composer, is it the public, is it the piano manufacturer, or the record producer?

Feinberg: It’s really a very pragmatic thing. You try to have the piano as close to what you want so that you feel that you can render the piece, and be expressive while not undermining your technique. You just try to be you, basically.

BD:   But for whom?

Feinberg: For yourself. It’s a matter of trying to enable yourself to do the best you can. If you’re very physically uncomfortable with the instrument, or if the instrument just will not do certain things, it can be very hard. You may have pulled the right expression of gestures in your heart, in your head, and even in your arms, but it does not come out. In the end, what’s important is what comes out on the instrument, so whatever you can do physically to have the instrument help you achieve that is what you have to work for.

BD:   Is this why the action may feel different, even though it’s not different, if the tuning is different?

Feinberg: Yes.

* * * * *

BD:   A big philosophical question... What’s the purpose of music?

Feinberg: [Thinks a moment] Like all the arts, it tells us something about ourselves in two different kinds of ways. One is that the music of a given period tells us something about our period, whatever period that is. It is still a mirror on our culture. The other thing about music is that, probably like all the arts — although clearly music is the one I’m most intrigued with — the practice of music, of making music, of hearing music, and of developing your relationship with music is one of those emblematic things where, at some level, it has to do with developing your relationship with yourself. One of the nice things about any creative endeavor is that you try to get better at what you’re doing. You try to understand what you’re doing, and you inevitably end up understanding yourself better, and building a relationship with yourself through, in this case, the medium of music.

BD:   And then sharing all of that with the audience?

Feinberg: Yes! I think very often about society now, as the arts are downgraded more and more, and sometimes neglected, they are very often given as pale shadows of themselves. I think about the example of amateur music-making for the better part of this century, which consisted of people who were not professionals, sitting down to playing their instruments.   Maybe people were playing four-hand music together, or playing string quartets, or symphonies in four-hand arrangements, or doing a little chamber music or trio sonatas. What’s the amateur music-making of the 1980s and the ’90s? Lip synching contests!

BD:   What about the four guys out in the garage with guitars and a drum set?

Feinberg: No, I think it’s lip-synching! It’s a cultural icon. It’s music-making where you don’t even make the music anymore. You lose the complete physical sensation of making music. One of the things that is so mystifying about certain amounts of contemporary music — especially that which people will categorize as seeming disjointed, or disjunct, or fragmentary — is that they have never physically experienced playing that kind of music. Like anything else, it can be fun to play a beautifully even scale. On a certain level, there can be a pleasant physical sensation, as well as hearing it sound nice, and enjoying it when it fits nicely within the piece. It involves playing some of these very complicated rhythms, or doing all sorts of different things that are not what people did when they were taking lessons as a kid. When you learn to do them, they also have their physical and aural gratification, and for people who have never done that, who have never experienced playing disjunct rhythms, or playing something that’s very rhythmic but is very unsteady, or learning how to do several rhythms at once, it just sounds really difficult. They don’t understand that it can also be fun to do.

BD:   Despite all this, are you optimistic about the future of music?

Feinberg: [Thinks a moment] Do you mean as a profession?

BD:   We should break it down into performing and composing.

Feinberg: I don’t know... I guess I’m optimistic in the sense that I don’t think music will cease. Music will continue to tell us about ourselves, but what this relationship in society will be will also change. It may change for something I like less than what it is now, and it may change back again to something more than it is now. It’s amazing to think that it was not much more than a hundred years ago when Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that music is the most direct expression of man’s will. People believed it, and took it very seriously. I was on a plane, and there was a little one of those shorts before the movie, and they said, “Do you know what Mozart is for? If you eat dinner while listening to Mozart, you will take in fewer calories than if you eat dinner listening to rap music, or rock ’n roll music.” [Both laugh]

BD:   Mozart as a dietary aid!

Feinberg: This is a long way from the most direct expression of man’s will! Music in our society in recent years has been a lifestyle choice. It’s like a Gucci bag. A lot of the classical music stations throughout the country have advertised music as a class thing. There was a series of ads for one of the classical music stations in New York City, where they had a photograph of a man sitting in an office. You could tell from the photo that he was in the corner of a tall building, and that he was high up because he had quite a view. He said, “I moved to New York City five years ago. Now I have my own office with a view, and I’m ready for W[xxx - call letters of the station]!” So, the meaning of music has changed in society, and I assume it will continue to change.

BD:   [With a bit of pride] We don’t do that at our station! We just play the music, and invite people to tune in. We mention that a number of other stations have gone under, or changed format, and ask that they subscribe to our Program Guide.

Feinberg: That’s okay, but many have stipulations about what makes for successful programming, and it’s the bits and pieces approach.

BD:   [Again, with a bit of pride] It’s policy at our station to play whole pieces. If you need seven minutes, find an overture. Don’t play just a movement. Find an etude, but don’t play part of a sonata.

Feinberg: Don’t sandwich everything by quick upbeat baroque pieces!

BD:   Right. We have a Baroque show, but then we also have Romantic shows, and we’ll do a nice mix. Then there are my American music shows, and while they’re usually scheduled a little bit late, I have found my following, and they’re always there, and they can be expected.

BD:   [At this point we stopped for a moment and my guest recorded a station break.] Is playing the piano, fun?

Feinberg: Yes! [Asking and then answering his own question] Is giving concerts fun? Not necessarily! [Laughs]

BD:   [Surprised] That’s two different things?

Feinberg: Oh, sure! They’re very different.

BD:   Can you really have one without the other?

Feinberg: There are a lot of people who play the piano but don’t give concerts! Giving concerts can be a strange compulsion. When people ask me about being a pianist, or about being a musician, my stock answer now is that it’s a wonderful lifestyle and a silly profession.

BD:   Can we assume that you don’t want to scrap concerts completely like Glenn Gould?

Feinberg: No, but it is a wonderful lifestyle. You do something you love. I’ve gotten to travel to many places that I would never have seen in any other profession. I’ve also gotten to meet a lot of people I like. I tend to like musicians! I find them warm, caring and interesting people, but the business side is crazy. You have to be out of your mind to actually contemplate it as a business.

BD:   One of the nice things about being at the station is that it’s fairly regular. I stick my neck out for the programming, but I don’t have to get involved with most other things. Thank you for spending some time with me today. I appreciate it.

Feinberg: Thank you.

See my interviews with Charles Dodge, Joan La Barbara, Ned Rorem, David Rakowski, Virgil Thomson, David Del Tredici, David Diamond, and Aaron Kernis

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on February 12, 1992. Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1995, and again in 2000; and on WNUR in 2007, 2008, and 2018; and on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio in 2010. This transcription was made in 2024, and posted on this website at that time. My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.