Piano (as orchestral instrument): Interview and demonstration with Kimberly Russ

playing in an orchestra is quite an educational experience for any pianist and I highly recommend it because pianists have to be so versatile it's wonderful to be able to be a soloist and most pianists grow up dreaming of being a famous soloist but as most of us know that's not very realistic and so we have to learn to be able to make money in many different ways and that may be accompanying you no soul other soloists or teaching lessons or playing in a large ensembles such as an orchestra or perhaps accompanying maybe a choral rehearsal with the all-star Orchestra we used to keyboard instruments there was the piano and then there was the chillest shil SR a very special instrument they have an interesting touch which sometimes is difficult to manage but you just have to learn how to to produce the sound pianos tend to have an even touch along the keyboard and Chile's aren't quite as when I was about four years old my grandmother in Orlando Florida had a Baldwin accra sonic piano in her living room that she enjoyed playing hymns out of the church hymnal and I would hear her play and one day I went and picked out tunes on the keyboard and my grandmother thought well you know we should have her take piano lessons I was the first grandchild in our family and so my aunt who was a schoolteacher took me to the iris Daniel Ingalls School of Music which was a huge southern plantation style house in Orlando and I started lessons there at five years old and from there I studied with iris Daniel Engle and her daughter Drusilla Engle and then I moved over to dr. Gary wolf at the University of Central Florida and I continued with him during my college studies when I decided to go back to school for my master's degree I had been in the the musical workforce for a couple years and at that point I had been teaching accompanying doing some solo playing I had a diverse background and when I decided to go back to school I thought well what is going to help me to make a living as a musician and be a pianist and I decided that the most practical thing for me to do would be to pursue a degree in collaborative piano the teachers at Julliard on the collaborative piano faculty were very well versed and all of those disciplines of what I was interested in and I knew by studying with each one of them I'd have a firm background for any opportunities that may present themselves to me in the future anyone thinking about wanting to go into music I would suggest starting with the piano because it gives the basic foundation of all musical that needs to be known particularly harmonic understanding so that if you play the piano you already know how to read notes on the treble clef and the bass clef possibly others if your piano teacher is very thorough there are other clefts too but that would give you the basis of learning key signatures and time signatures and then you could take that and apply that to any other instrument that you would want to to learn to play playing the piano specifically I would say to find a teacher that teaches the fundamentals and a teacher that is personally compatible with the student because not only is it important what you learned that to have that compatibility is important too and continuity week to week so if the student enjoys going to see the teacher every week and looks forward to doing their homework then they're going to have a productive time learning how to play how to become specialized it I think you know as a professional musician I think that has to lie deep in the desires of the child and and if they want to pursue music as a career it's that's a very big decision and so they would have to approach taking piano lessons very seriously with knowing they were going to be doing a lot of practicing but I suggest studying music for everyone because it helps us self-discipline and you can translate to many things you learn about music into other things in life you