Author's Note
In my teenage years in high school I had an exuberant idea that I should see at least one opera performance every night in my hometown as part of my high-school curriculum where I studied classical music composition, history, music harmony and three (3) separate instruments with piano being my main instrument and clarinet/flute being secondary. Consequently, in order to expand my knowledge of Opera, I bought an annual pass to local Opera House with intent to see opera performance every single night by either Puccini, Berlioz, Verdi, Donizetti and other great opera composers I admired and followed.
This was when I was 16 years old, and at that time of course I also delighted in listening to Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Moody Blues, Ten Years After, King Crimson, Soft Machine, Henri Texier, Keith Jarrett, Ian Carr & Nucleus, Frank Zappa with his amazing musical experiments and many others, but opera and instrumental symphonic music were always fascinating to me, and like studying Shakespeare in my later years and I could never get enough of it.
The idea of seeing opera performance every night was entirely mine I thought originally, and quite honestly I strongly believed that I was the only one among my peers with such concept, and that in fact all my music teachers would be very proud of me that I was "the only one" going to opera every night. However, to my utter shock and disbelief I found out that all my teachers and colleagues were also going to opera every night on their own and that they also wanted to see it all alone, hence eventually, as the season started I began recognizing everyone in the audience one-by-one. and I couldn't believe it. Everyone I knew was in the audience, and the friends and teachers who were not were in the orchestra pit - playing. Some of them played the flute, the clarinet, the oboe, others played cello, viola, or the violin.
So this was the environment where I grew up. and learned about music. To come to think of it from the perspective of today and looking at what kids do today this seems kind of bizarre, even explaining this seems bizarre because music these days is so commercialized, but this biographical sort of note is an informal preface to my work, and explains why I am so fortunate to be both - artist and scientist, and it also explains why most of my projects deal with science, culture, education and the arts as I look at the world as somebody who has lived and functioned in the myriad of diverse cultural domains for my entire life.
Here’s a photograph of mine with a well-known composer, a sort of undeclared giant of contemporary classical music. She's a distinguished classical music composition professor at University of Chicago , professor Marta Ptaszynska who was my teacher, and a mentor and who is part of what I call my secret circle of master teachers. The reason I refer to her as "master teacher" is that she is one those teachers who show up early in your life with their high-level of energy and creativity that is enough to turn your life around, or upside down and I was quite fortunate to have several such teachers in my life.
Earlier this year I visited her on the campus at University of Chicago where she has been teaching composition and we had great time together reminiscing on music and the arts at Cafe Medici on this great university's historic campus. This year professor Marta Ptaszynska wrote an opera called "Lovers from the Monastery of Valdemossa" based on the libretto by Janusz Krasinski about Sand and Chopin that is premiering in Europe this Fall. This year, Prof. Ptaszynska has also become a distinguished recipient of prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship which she can add to her many achievements.
The following is a photograph of mine with Prof. Marta Ptaszynska preparing me for a concert in 1965 featuring one of her compositions. I was to play the snare drum and the xylophone custom-made for me from balsa cherry wood by head percussionist of Philharmonic Orchestra for this occasion.
Prof. Ptaszynska wasn't of course just an ordinary teacher or instructor of snare drums as shown above in this ancient photograph. She's a classical composer placing great weight on the role of percussion in many orchestral and instrumental compositions being performed for the past four decades to highest critical acclaims worldwide.
Marta Ptaszynska's legacy comes straight from the music of Chopin, Szymanowski, Lutoslawski, Penderecki and Gorecki and she is a contemporary giant of classical music today, although she is very modest about it. However, as soon as one plays her music we can immediately recognize elements of her multi-dimensional, dodecaphonic compositions having roots in the very best of classical music.
Originally, my main instrument was concert piano, and I trained with another master teacher Prof. Thun-Salecka for a number of years, than of course my brief studies with Prof. Nadia Boulanger in Paris while awaiting for my visa to United States in 1972. While still in my teenager years I took up the Clarinet and the Flute with two other master teachers and finally began to play all woodwinds - tenor sax, altor, soprano, even oboe. However, I spend considerable amount of time with Prof. Marta Ptaszynska learning the basics of composition with her while listening to her amazing percussion, xylophone and vibraphone works, and other classical works for percussion at the Music High School where she taught.
Together with Prof. Marta Ptaszynska we practiced with other students in quartets, quintets, sextets and octets while Professor Ptaszynska’s was fine tuning her multidimensional music compositions. I even had a hand-made xylophone made for me for those sessions by first xylophonist at the local Philharmonic Orchestra - it was an excellent one actually, and the musician and master technician has worked many months on this getting the right combinations of cherry wood for me so it would sound great. With Prof. Ptaszynska I learned to play the xylophone and later the marimba, and the vibraphone - both distant cousins of the classical piano. It was quite an experience.
Years later after I left to Paris to study music composition more seriously. Prof. Marta Ptaszynska and I both briefly studied with another master teacher - Prof. Nadia Boulanger, although we did it a few years apart. Later, I spend considerable time at IHDEC (Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques) studying film directing and cinematography before I came to New York in 1973.
In 1976 I took my first film directing class at New York University Film School after coming back from Maine Photographic Workshop with David Layman in Rockport, Maine that was just starting to become sort of a mecca for filmmakers from all over the world. At the New York University film directing class we were making a documentary about jazz with Michael Brecker.
In those years I spend a lot of time writing for film, practicing and playing various types of music - classical, jazz, pop, progressive rock and I always continued to go to Opera. While in Paris I frequently thought about a life that Chopin faced in Paris - all by himself, not knowing anyone when he arrived in Montparnasse from Stuttgart in his coach in 1829, his amazing talent and genius unnoticed, wondering from place to place, looking for a place to stay in a town full of strangers who had no idea who he was.
The City of Lights has always been a mystery to me and still is to many - a labyrinth of history and cosmopolitanism from all over world, yet uniquely Parisian.
We Americans get lost in Paris instantly, and I am not talking just about going under Arch d’Triomphe circle that fills us out with terror whenever we face thousands of cars constantly going around unequivocally submerged in a giant whirlpool of autos.
Americans get lost in the introverted Parisian culture, as Paris alone immediately puts us in defensive position until somebody comes around and gives us a tour of the Latin Quarter, and usually someone does and becomes our friend, or until we allow ourselves enough time to stay around long enough to learn about this amazing city's language and the vernacular. Then, Paris comes alive for us and The City of Lights is of course an amazing place to live in. I find that the French are not prejudiced at all. It's just that it's a tough city to survive if you don't know your way around, and if you are not from there.
While living in Paris and studying composition and film I used to go with my first dates to listen to concerts of Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald at Salle Pleyel. This was in the 70'ies. For me America's greatest gift to the world in addition to its literature and science was jazz, and at that time my favorite instrument was the flute which I still play quite well, and at that time I played pretty good jazz frequently testing various melodic themes of my compositions at various gigs with friends in after-hour pubs, some quite avant-garde whenever I could find enough people to play with.
Flute is the instrument I still love to play live, and of course the piano. I have a video with a fragment of my recent concert in I played with rather strange concoction of Hendrix and Santana at a night club in Sarasota in February of 2009 and it went pretty well. The band was very loud and the keyboard player accidentally lowered my microphone to levels where I could hardly hear myself with the lead guitarist ripping it wide open, but it still sounded pretty well.
Back in 1972 when I was constantly practicing Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A-Major, the only concerto Mozart wrote for clarinet. After performing it to a standing ovation and accomplishing my goal I then decided to pack up my bags and leave for New York. This was a brave move because I was all alone without any connections in the New World. However, before I arrived in New York I took a huge detour through a lot of countries. Unfortunately, by then my professional piano playing days were over, as we all know that when you play piano you're married to the instrument and you have to spend countless of hours on it in practice. If my amazing piano teacher Prof. Thun-Salecka knew that I was switching instruments and venues, with intentions on becoming a scientist and artist, a writer and filmmaker and going to New York she would most likely discourage me because she was a great piano player and she knew. Since I saw her twice a week at her salon with my father since the age of 5 she would probably tell me not to take those risks and stay with piano practice.
Professor Thun-Salecka understood classical music like Cortot and Cortot was a French master like Chopin. He played from his soul. I do not know how my Dad found her, but she taught piano with virtuosity and sadness of Sergei Rachmaninoff and with the intellectual pugnacity of Josef Hoffman. She always made her students perform works for two pianos, not one and made us play Bach, Mozart and Scarlatti in duets together, and improvise using two pianos, while she frequently pitched in on third piano correcting tempo and expression.
The end of the concert was the best, and the best of us ended up playing solo "for real" - and I usually got the honor of playing solo at those concerts every single time getting plenty of ice-cream afterwards. It was very competitive.
Mozart was my favorite then, as it is now, and of course Chopin and Bach along with various transcriptions of Opera's bel canto transcribed for the piano by Liszt e.g. Bizet's Carmen and Paganini's works transcribed for the piano. They were hard to play, but at Professor Thun-Salaecka salon everything was possible - even Paganini on the piano.
John Mark playing piano at young age.
My Father understood classical music very well. He was an outstanding violinist, even though he was on his way to becoming a doctor, and studying at the nearby medical school and having a dream for me to become a great concert pianist and a conductor. He introduced me to classical piano and opened the world of classical music and knowledge for me in general. My Father was also an intellectual. While going to my piano classes with Prof. Thun-Salecka my Father and I had heated discussions about Homer and Plato, and various ideas in science and literature arguing sometimes for many hours about many men and women of excellence and their ideas. It is because of him that I understood what it really means to play Bach, Mozart and Chopin well and what a privilege it was studying the piano and classical music with those great masters.
John Mark with his Father - a violinist and a medical doctor.
Today, I have a Rudall Carte & Co. flute that I have been playing for forty years, the only one I ever had most of my adult life after I switched to it from performing Mozart's Clarinet Concerto A Major K622 on my Selmer clariner. After graduting and receiving High School of Music diploma I realized that I was burned out, I stopped playing the clarinet and returned to playing the flute and the piano.
Throughout my life I loved Chopin, Bach and Mozart - the "big three" as I called, and I loved them for various reasons for their purity and perfection. I especially appreciated Chopin's genius for his poetry which comes directly from the music legacy of Bach and Mozart. There are rarely any shortcuts to Chopin’s music. It’s either Bach, Mozart, or Chopin.
I love the piano mainly because of Chopin, and because of this instrument's amazing range of expression that you can never find anywhere else. When played right, and by the right artist the piano is simply incomparable to anything.
The piano has the greatest range of artistic expression of all music instruments. I believe the piano has the power to change peoples lives, as it can completely capture the hearts people across nations and cultures, across the music genres, religions, ages and express human emotions on such deep level that nothing else compares to it. The piano is also the most complex mechanical instrument ever build by man and until this day unsurpassed in its complexity and mechanical perfection, and its history is unprecedented.
In 19th Century the Pianoforte was the centerpiece in every home, and manufacturers such as Broadwood, Pleyel and Erard went to great lengths to compete for customers in the same way that today's global companies compete for eyeballs, ears and feet in the world of cars, cellphones, music players and movies.
Great pianists and great musicians like Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, Klara Schumann, and Brahms understood this music very well, they played it well and created a legacy for us that will last forever.
My film project Liszt & Chopin In Paris recreates that legacy. It recreates the legacy of the Romantic Era with so much authenticity and fun, but it also tells phenomenal story about those musicians with amazing amount of drama with an incredible amount of insight - it tells us who those artists truly were and how they lived their lives in the greatest historical period of all time.
John Mark's piano in California circa 1997
In mid 90'ies I returned to serious piano playing just for this film project and recorded this 150th Anniversary Box-Set for Liszt & Chopin In Paris accompanied by a great screenplay and a great treatment that I also wrote describing and honoring the genius of Chopin and those amazing pianists who lived in the magical years between 1830 and 1849 that brought us the Romantic Age.
Now, I still enjoy playing the Rudall & Carte flute, and I look forward to taking my music experience to a whole new level and to recording even more piano music with the best of the best in music and with high-end studio technology for this film eventually,
I recorded these piano "pyrotechnics" for Liszt & Chopin In Paris for a film that is yet to be produced about those two most amazing emigrees Liszt and Chopin - two phenomenal classical music geniuses who defined modern piano playing, and who took it to such great heights in order to see what their music would sound like as a foretaste for the movie, and what I needed to do when opportunity knocked on door to produce, or co-produce it with someone.
You can hear and download some selections from Liszt & Chopin In Paris - 150th Anniversary Album on my Facebook page at the link below - the recordings are meant of course to be a foretaste of what is yet to come as the film has not yet been produced, and hopefully will be very soon. Cheers.
http://apps.facebook.com/ilike/artist/JOHN+MARK+LCIP/track/Liszt+%2526+Chopin+In+Paris+-+Original+Soundtrack+Part+I
Excerpts from "Liszt & Chopin In Paris" book are available at this link -
http://johnmarkjournal.blogspot.com/
