{"id":1775,"date":"2014-03-19T07:51:47","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T14:51:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/?p=1775"},"modified":"2018-03-02T07:53:31","modified_gmt":"2018-03-02T15:53:31","slug":"piano-probabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/archives\/1775","title":{"rendered":"Piano Probabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seymour Benzer was a great scientist, \u201cwhose biography,\u201d said a colleague, \u201cCaltech shines up every year at Nobel Prize time.\u201d An old friend of my parents, and instrumental in my first appointment at Caltech, he once asked, \u201cHow do you make a concert career, anyway?\u201d I said, \u201cThe best way is to be so accomplished and gifted that you don\u2019t have to \u2018make\u2019 anything; the career unrolls itself before you.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, such super-duper performers would include Yo-Yo Ma, Yuja Wang, Lang-Lang, Marta Argerich, Evgeny Kissin, and some others. (This list isn\u2019t for arguing over, but just to convey the idea.) In my parents\u2019 day, pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Jascha Heifitz.<\/p>\n

After Einstein heard the 13-year-old Menuhin, he embraced him and exclaimed, \u201cNow I know there is a God in heaven!\u201d And when the Russian-born Heifitz, age 17, burned up the stage at Carnegie Hall, the great violinist Mischa Elman, in the audience, murmured to pianist Leopold Godowsky, \u201cIsn\u2019t it awfully hot in here?\u201d And Godowsky smiled. \u201cNot for pianists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the rest of us,\u201d I explained to Seymour, \u201cwinning a major international competition is a good step.\u201d (Not that I ever did). Of course, many are won by the Super-Dupers, with lesser players hoping to pinch one the way a merely superb chess player might grab a title when Fischer or Kasparov don\u2019t stoop to compete.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut even winning a competition\u201d (I served up the bad news) \u201cdoesn\u2019t do much for you without a catalyst like the unique political-cultural context surrounding Van Cliburn\u2019s win at the Tchaikovsky Competition. Or a dispute.\u201d When jury and audience, or factions of the jury, disagree on the merits of the contestants, it makes for great<\/i> publicity; and everybody wants to judge those performers for themselves. \u201cThat,\u201d I told Seymour, \u201csells tickets!\u201d<\/p>\n

At the Montreal International Piano Competition, when the list of contestants making it into the finals was read at midnight on my birthday, and the alphabetical order passed me by, two audience members called out, \u201cBoyk! You skipped Boyk!\u201d A professional musician from the area told me, \u201cAll the musicians in town are here, and we\u2019re all keeping lists of our favorites. And you\u2019re number one of all the lists I\u2019ve seen.\u201d But these meant nothing; generated no publicity. Pleasant memories, though.<\/p>\n

\u201cComing down to everyday reality\u201d (I offered gleanings from my pre-YouTube struggles, wondering what Seymour was making of it all), \u201cyou can fund your own concerts in places with a chance of big audiences and major reviews\u201d (\u201cExpensive!\u201d he said) \u201cthen accumulate 50 or 100 raves from the USA, UK and Europe. Praise from \u2018outside\u2019\u2014from Europe if you\u2019re in the USA, from the East Coast if you\u2019re on the West Coast, (from Microsoft, I wouldn\u2019t be surprised, if you work for Apple)\u2014is more potent than \u2018inside\u2019 praise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reviews in hand, in those days, you approached the managers who could get you bookings by the power of their rosters. (\u201cYou can have Rubinstein,\u201d they\u2019d crack the whip on a concert series, \u201cif you take three unknowns.\u201d) One pianist\u2019s mother\u2014not at all a \u2018stage mother\u2019\u2014was convinced that Sol Hurok put her son on the roster merely to keep him out<\/i> of competition with pianists already on the list.<\/p>\n

I added another aspect of everyday reality: \u201cBe alert for opportunities.\u201d I thought I saw one when Sandor Kallai, director of Meadowbrook, the Detroit Symphony\u2019s summer home, complimented me after a recital in Michigan. He talked to others for a while, then returned to compliment me again; so I figured he meant it. \u201cThank you, Mr. Kallai,\u201d said I. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you engage me for Meadowbrook?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh ho ho<\/i>, young man,\u201d said he, \u201cI couldn\u2019t engage you unless your career were to take a sudden upward leap.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Kallai,\u201d said I, \u201cyour engaging me would constitute<\/i> a sudden upward leap!\u201d He laughed two \u201cha\u201ds\u2019 worth; and you\u2019ve never seen a laugh cut off so sharply as when he turned and walked away.<\/p>\n

At an Affiliate Artist conference on Long Island, I was talking about performance and education to a man who seemed as enthusiastic about my ideas as I was. He was the director of the Music Program of the National Endowment for the Arts! And he invited me to apply for a grant! \u201cFor once, Boyk,\u201d I remember thinking, \u201cyou\u2019re in luck. They say grants come where the funding organization initiates the contact.\u201d I worked hard on the proposal, submitted it to NEA, and\u2014was turned down flat.<\/p>\n

At one point, I asked advice from artist manager Mariedi Anders. \u201cTell me, my dear,\u201d she asked, \u201chow many bookings you arranged for yourself this season.\u201d I told her. \u201cMy advice to you, my dear, is, Continue to do exactly as you are doing. You are doing much better for yourself than I could possibly do.\u201d She said that for the well-regarded European pianist Walter Klien, she\u2019d been able to arrange zero American bookings that season.<\/p>\n

I shared an insight with Seymour: \u201cYou know what the problem is? There\u2019s only a finite amount of money available to pay performers, and an infinite pool of performers competing for that money.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as I put it that way to myself,\u201d I told him, \u201cit was obvious that I should stop competing for that money and generate new money instead. Skip the concert series and the artist manager! Go direct to the audience by creating a TV series. Do for classical music what Julia Child<\/a> did for French cooking. People who liked me on TV (this was before \u201cliking\u201d) would demand to hear me in concert. A career would roll itself out before me!<\/p>\n

All this had been adding up in Seymour\u2019s mind; and now I saw the light bulb go on above his head; and he said, \u201cI get it! You can\u2019t assign a probability to success!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSeymour,\u201d I said, \u201cthat\u2019s exactly right!\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

\u201cAssign a probability\u201d means say how likely something is to happen. If it\u2019s a certainty, the probability is 1. If it\u2019s guaranteed not to happen, the probability is 0. Otherwise, it\u2019s somewhere between 1 and 0. If \u201cthe odds are 50-50,\u201d the probability is .5. What Seymour meant was that trying to make a career as a performer is so complex and uncertain that you can\u2019t even say what the probability is! <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seymour Benzer was a great scientist, \u201cwhose biography,\u201d said a colleague, \u201cCaltech shines up<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1776,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775\/revisions\/1776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}