Cliburn: Striking Human Gold! – Defending the Jury part 1

There are so many things people are hoping for in the winner of the Cliburn. Every 4 years this veritable Piano Olympiad usually picks a winner who possesses pure virtuosity, stage presence and superb musicianship. Expectations are high for the Pianists and the pressure is intense to say the least.  This year was different and also special as with both winners two myths were busted, and with one, the expectations were suddenly turned around on to us the audience……

This year the web-cast was one of the stars, and for up to a year you can watch most of the performances again and again.  Yet what the web-cast ultimately proved was that you only really got what happened if you were there.  Many of the vitriolic opinions were based on watching through a computer, and some quite frankly puzzled me because I was there for all of finals week, and what cannot be transmitted successfully yet through the web, was the feeling of the collective audience in the hall, the total organic experience,the visceral reactions, gasps, shouts, sighs etc….  All of that made the experience complete.  I don’t care what anyone says about the jury, they (unlike computers) are human beings and they felt, heard and saw all of the audience’s reactions, so to claim that they should not be affected by that means they do not live and breathe, and that they might as well have judged it on their computers also.

Most of them are performers, so an audience connection (which made them successful) is also something they are judging.  Watching on a monitor, and listening through a basic speaker system whilst better than nothing at all, is good for reference at best, which was well pointed out by Scott Cantrell (he has written some excellent follow ups also) from the Dallas Morning News in response to that bigoted, ignorant writer Benjamin Ivry from the Wall Street Journal to whom which I responded to also.  In all of this he was the one who was truly blind!

Upon reflection what we witnessed and experienced was something extraordinary.  One of my old teachers used to say that when it comes to performance it is great when “something happens”.  Skill, musicianship and sound etc.. those are things that can be taught, and good performances can be manufactured.  With Nobuyuki Tsujii (Nobu), something happened.  I heard from people both there and online that maybe he wasn’t the best Pianist if you strip away his story, but that is the point, how can you strip that away?   It’s impossible to do that especially when you were there and besides, I am so sick of hearing the phrase “it should be just about the music”.  Really?  Tell me then, so what is the music about?  Music is never usually about the music, it’s about us, humanity, experience, life, love, death, adversity and much more.  With Nobu that human element was present in every note.  There was a transcendence through the music so that it was all turned on us, it was suddenly about us.  I looked around at the audience during his Chopin 1, and there were tears everywhere.  I saw someone clutching their chest as if he wanted to embrace the moment.  I looked at the orchestra, and again tears (in the rehearsals too!).  According to witnesses sitting close to the jury, during his prelim recital, tears.  This was real,  SOMETHING HAPPENED!  Furthermore, thanks to Nobu the Cliburn became more than a triumph for Pianists, it smashed through a barrier for the blind and proved that there isn’t an obstacle that can’t be overcome and that vision is not only for those who can see.  This was a human triumph, the Cliburn became a vehicle for humanity.  Music has shown us in history that it can deliver a great composer who cannot hear, and great performers who cannot see, and with the latter now in Classical music as well as in popular music.   I don’t care what anyone says about his blindness being taken into account, any advantage he may have been given (and I don’t believe that he was given any) doesn’t even come close to the disadvantage he has to be able to do what he does, or even to get through life.  Most of us have the ability to listen with our eyes open or closed, he doesn’t have that choice!  That cannot (and must not) be ignored!

What we witnessed was as real as it gets, and more than great virtuosity, it is a triumph like this that can move music forward.  Yes I hear it, but we want it to be about the music!  Yet we will be in the wilderness if the music is not about us. I contend that when music becomes relevant then it becomes necessary.  The Cliburn has now made this connection, and it’s a blind Pianist that has the vision to lead the way!

In part 2- There is something extraordinary about the other gold medalist Haochen Zhang also…..

13 thoughts on “Cliburn: Striking Human Gold! – Defending the Jury part 1”

  1. What happens when people get used to the idea that a blind person can play piano as well as a sighted person? What happens when they are no long awed by Tsujii because he’s blind and are able to truly listen to him play as they listen to sighted people play? Won’t it be true then that the audience response will be as nearly as possible just about the music?

    If the tears in the Cliburn audience were a response to the (admittedly amazing and admirable) achievement of a person because of his blindness, rather than having anything to do with the music he was producing, then is it fair for the judges to take that into account?

    However encouraging Tsujii’s achievement may be for people who are blind (and I don’t doubt that it is), encouraging the blind is not the mission of the Cliburn Foundation, which is about fostering high achievement in classical piano musicianship.

    • Duane
      I want to reply to you using your comments to directly respond (you in italics, me in bold):

      What happens when people get used to the idea that a blind person can play piano as well as a sighted person? What happens when they are no long awed by Tsujii because he’s blind and are able to truly listen to him play as they listen to sighted people play? Won’t it be true then that the audience response will be as nearly as possible just about the music?

      We are talking about a first, like a Neil Armstrong or an Edmund Hillary. One of the most important things here is that for any physically challenged person the hope is one day their challenge is not taken into account, and it is just the music that is being focused upon( in the case of a blind performer). Tsujii has just made that a possibility and with no exaggeration, just as the Wright brothers did by making flight possible, his achievement gave many people true hope.

      If the tears in the Cliburn audience were a response to the (admittedly amazing and admirable) achievement of a person because of his blindness, rather than having anything to do with the music he was producing, then is it fair for the judges to take that into account?

      It is actually pure speculation that his blindness was taken into account, here is what jury member Veda Kaplinsky said in the Wall Street Journal:
      Veda Kaplinsky, a Cliburn jurist who chairs the piano department at the Juilliard School, said Mr. Tsujii’s blindness played no role in his win. “He touched us with very honest, very forthright and very beautiful musicianship,” she said.


      However encouraging Tsujii’s achievement may be for people who are blind (and I don’t doubt that it is), encouraging the blind is not the mission of the Cliburn Foundation, which is about fostering high achievement in classical piano musicianship.

      Here is a hypothetical, if a scientist is mixing two chemical compounds to create a cure for male pattern baldness, and instead it turns out to be a cure for cancer, do we discount it because curing cancer wasn’t the original mission? I have talked at length with Richard Rodzinski the executive director, and the Cliburn is so much more than a competition about as you put it “fostering high achievement in classical piano musicianship”. That is what music schools do. There is so much hope at the Cliburn to find ambassadors for music, to promote new music (hence the new works that are a requirement), but more than that, to transform music and the art of performance into something relevant and necessary. My basic philosophy is that playing and instrument, conducting and composing are just skills. Our job and our mission is to employ those skills to touch people’s lives. On a related note, a friend of mine whom I had not seen in several months completely forgot until the end of our conversation that she had had heart surgery since I saw her last. The surgeon’s skill was to fix her heart, but one step beyond that is the surgeon’s job to make her forget she had a problem in the first place. The skill of the Cliburn is to crown brilliant pianists, their job however is to foster more love, appreciation and relevancy for music through those pianists! With Nobuyuki they have just emphatically established those connections to the blind, and with that more than moving music forward, they have moved humanity forward. That is more important than any pre prescribed mission.

      The point of my post was that when he performed something happened, and the collective feeling in the room was impossible to ignore and we (including the jury) were completely swept up by that feeling, we didn’t want it to end. He just has it, and at just 20 years old, blind and with no English he proved beyond any reasonable measure of a doubt that music truly is indeed a pure form of communication and a universal language. That was what was also crowned.

  2. This is a brilliantly eloquent and well conceived piece.
    The rebuttal to “it should be just about the music” being that music is rarely about the music but instead about humanity and life is a point extremely well taken.
    Thank you for this.
    Richard

  3. Suppose (hypothetically) that Tsujii had not taken part in the competition this year and that Zhang, the youngest competitor, was the youngest competitor of all time (I have no idea if that happens to be true or not). Suppose further that the audience responded to his youth with tears and amazement whenever he performed.

    Would anyone think it fair if the judges did not try to ignore his age and, insofar as humanly possible, judge his performance on its musical merits alone? It might, of course, be hard to to tell the difference when tears are evoked by the sheer beauty and excellence of a performance and when they are evoked by the fact of achievement in one so young. Surely, though, the judges should try to draw that distinction.

    Isn’t this what the critics are trying to get at when they say “it should be just about the music?” Surely they don’t mean it should be just about whether or not all the correct notes are played. Don’t you think that they also realize that considerations of how well a musical performance evokes human emotions is relevant and important? What, I presume, they are saying should not be a consideration—for the judges—is a performer’s background circumstances per se, even if (or perhaps especially if) those circumstances may also evoke emotions, independently of the quality of their music.

    • Duane
      I will write about Haochen this week but in response to this comment, Zhang and Tsujii are only one year apart at 19 and 20 respectively, and Zhang also did win the Gold medal. So at least on the pure evidence of achievement they were not able to be separated by the jury, which kind of blows the whole theory that someone’s personal story was the overriding factor in their win since there were two winners. As the jury did not take Tsujii’s blindness into consideration, they also didn’t take Zhang’s age into consideration, but perhaps they took his maturity into consideration, which has nothing to do with age actually, just as they took Tsujii’s pure and honest music making into consideration. Here’s how I believe it went down in very generalized terms: Zhang makes music compelling and his small frame does not prevent him from being a giant at the keyboard, he is extraordinary. Tsujii IS compelling and he makes the music about us, and there is room for both at the top, kind of like Janos Starker and Yo Yo Ma, or Radu Lupu and Van Cliburn, Albert Einstein and Frank Sinatra etc…In other words there are those who are revered, and those who are beloved and either quality can make someone successful, and then there are the very few who are both revered and beloved and Van and Yo Yo come to mind here. The bottom line is that if you were there, it would have been clear that there was no way to separate the incredible audience connection achieved, and a true audience connection goes well beyond analysis of who the “best” was! Another winner then is the “live performance”, as no matter how good the technology was with the web-cast, it was still not even close to the live experience.

  4. I have been trying—with apparently not much success—to articulate what the critics might be thinking when they say it should just be about the music. Please understand that I’m not personally criticizing the Cliburn judges’ choices. I am not musically qualified to do so.

    I fully understand that people respond to a performer in many ways other than just by listening to his/her aural output and there is nothing wrong with that. Given that the Cliburn judges are trying to pick pianists who can succeed in entertaining audiences around the world, they must consider more than just the musical sound. A pianist who came out on stage and never looked at or interacted with the audience would not be acceptable no matter how well he/she played.

    Once, though, the demeanor of a pianist passes the threshold of audience acceptability, which presumably all the finalists did, simply by virtue of getting to the finals, then, it seems to me, fair to say it should just come down to the musical sound. If they wanted to insure real fairness, they would blindfold the judges in the finals so that their decisions would be based only on what they heard and how what they heard affected them emotionally.

    As for the comment that “no matter how good the technology was with the web-cast, it was still not even close to the live experience,” that may have been true of these particular web-casts, but it is not necessarily true. We have the technology to produce a digital recording which, if played back with the right equipment, would be indistinguishable from what you would hear sitting in Bass Hall.

    • Firstly, you have been very articulate and I am enjoying this discourse! I just disagree with the critics! In response to this comment I actually think you have it in reverse, it is probably more about the music in the prelims as the 29 Pianists who were picked all have performance experience. They are first separated for the ability to connect musically and have secure technique with their nerves under control. I contend that when the 12 semi-finalists are picked, the jury takes bigger risks because they can, as they still have to bring it down to 6. When it gets to the final 6 then it becomes about something more and everything is judged in a more balanced way, with the ability to connect as an equal component, since that is what they (the finalists) will have to do when they are “out there”. The jury members are not charged with finding the best Pianist or musician but those who stand out as ready (Listen again to what Richard Rodzinski said at the awards ceremony), with upside potential and who are also compelling enough for presenters to believe that these are performers that will continue to grow to be worthy of re-engagement. There are no sure things and many Pianists who did not win the Cliburn in the past but instead placed highly are doing better than the winners of those years. The jury now is more cognizant of that history and so are looking now also for those who have the most potential to grow. This means that someone who may be “better” may be placed lower because the jurors are seeing that maybe their growth has reached a peak. Tsujii, and Zhang both have huge potential, and so by awarding each of them the gold, the jury has determined in my view that these are the two with the best chance to grow a career, rather than having 3 years worth of engagements and then be essentially done with any major career. On your last comment, whether or not the right equipment would make the sound indistinguishable, no equipment can actually recreate the palpable feeling, unison breaths and visceral reactions of those both near and far from you in an audience. If that was ever accomplished through technology, then maybe live music would be in real trouble! The Cliburn is not a final exam, it’s a starting exam after a final exam. It is a competition in which the Pianists are put in a real situation, so are the jurors, i.e as audience members, so blindfolding them then takes away a key element because that is not how we listen to a live performance (no blindfolds are handed out, but of course people will close their eyes from time to time). Now if Tsujii becomes a juror for any future competition, he will have no choice but to not see the performance, but that is real for him!

  5. So let me get this straight.

    1) Nobu may not have been the best pianist, but
    2) Audiences reacted quite strongly to him, so
    3) He is a valid gold medal winner.

    Is the Cliburn looking for the best classical pianist? Or are they doing something else?

    David Helfgott moved MANY people when he did his ‘Shine’ tour…would he also have won a gold medal? People get extremely emotional at Jonas Brothers concerts…should they get gold medals? Once it’s not about the music anymore, but about something else, then these questions become valid, like it or not.

    The issue here is simple. People view Nobu as having the biggest potential to take classical piano into a wider sphere and possibly greater popularity. That’s fine and it may even be true. But that’s NOT about the best pianist anymore – that’s about the most popular pianist. And of course, it’s not even about the most popular pianist (who knows whether Nobu will be popular) but it’s about the pianist viewed as having the most potential popularity…because he’s blind.

    He won because he’s blind, and he’s a solid enough pianist (i.e. he’s not Helfgott). Admit it. He wasn’t the best pianist there by a long shot, and if he were sighted he wouldn’t have come close to the Finals.

    • Mike
      Wow a lot of ifs, I can safely say that there were 6 Pianists in the finals, and all of them had many calling each of them the best. Can you say definitively who the best was? I can’t, and the Jury is not looking at it that way either, I am about to post about Haochen (the equal “best” this year) and I articulate further what I am getting at.

  6. I would like to thank both men for their comments and thoughts. I have just read these articles for the first time, almost 1 year after the competition and after having seen, last night, the premier of “A Surprise in Texas” the Peter Rosen documentary about the 2009 Cliburn competition. (Which I hope everyone who loves great music and incredible performances will make a “must” see.)

    What does great music, (or great art of any type) mean to me, or you, or anyone. I believe it is your own emotional response that counts. A superior performance has always given me chills, or brought tears to my eyes. And yes even a recording can do that – but it is always much more satisfying when it is a live performance. And we, the ticket buying public should be just as important to the performer. So obviously the jurors must be involved with more than just the technical abilities of these performers. (And I am sure everyone agrees that they are all incredible.) Did Di Wu give me chills? Absolutely! Did Vacatello and Bozhanov and Son and Zhang? Without a doubt! And Nobu, certainly! But Nobu also brought fountains of tears to my and everyones eyes. Maybe it wasn’t even fair to let him into the competition. But I don’t think any of his fellow competitors would say that. I don’t think anyone of them feels ashamed that they lost to a blind man who played as beautifully as he does. Nobu is to me and should be to everyone a true inspiration for his musicality inspite of his blindness, which fortunately for all of us is not a handicap. He met the challenge of the Cliburn and survived (as Di Wu so emphatically stated about herself in the documentary.) and deserved his gold medal and all the future sucess that I hope it brings him.

  7. Like the commenter above, I came upon these comments late. Probably no one will see this but I have to put in my two cents’ worth, for the record.

    More than a year later, Nobuyuki is now 22, and has become a worldwide sensation. His Cliburn winner CD has sold more than 100,000 copies, and his Chopin Concerto 1 CD has sold even more. He will be performing Chopin Concerto 1 in Poughkeepsie, New York next Saturday Oct 2, 2010), probably once again bringing down the house. YouTube videos of his piano performances have gone viral in a big way.

    Is it not better for more people, through Nobu, to become appreciative of classical piano music, or is it better to keep the art an obscure preoccupation for a few?

    Nobuyuki Tsujii is a musical genius – he is beyond a gold medal. But I salute the 2009 Cliburn jury for their acumen in awarding Tsujii even though it must not have escaped them there would be second-guessing of their decision. Bravo to them and to all who were involved with the 2009 Cliburn Competition.

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