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In brief... Peter Elyakim
Taussig is neither award-winning nor
internationally renowned. Born in Czechoslovakia where he was considered a Jew, he fled to Israel where he was considered a Czech, then in Canada he was considered an Israeli, and now in the United States he is of course a Canadian. Always one step behind. The most consistent aspect of Taussig’s career is a complete lack of consistency. He has a BA in Islamic studies (1965), a Masters degree in music (1970), was a concert pianist (1972-1985), an experimental video artist (1982-1990), a festival director (Stratford Summer Music 1980-82), a stand up comedian and performance artist (1982-1989). Between 1991 and 2008 he tried various other things, including being a Yogi, inventing software for handicapped pianists to record without the use of their fingers (Yamaha-“Musical Sculpting” 2001), establishing an experimental children’s music literacy program with computers (Lenox Mass.-PianoKids 2002-2009), and designing a math and music curriculum (“PianoMath” 2007). Composing with his
virtual orchestra and the portable studio in the Baerkshires
Presently he is a full-time has-been and a part-time
composer. Over his long and undistinguished career Taussig created 14 art videos, an opera, oratorio, a requiem, 5 concertos, 101 symphonies, and a single daughter. Except for the daughter, none of these have seen the light of day. His refusal to be considered a “serious” artist, participate in the grant writing racket, attend conferences, or talk about the content and historical significance of his work may have something to do with his near total obscurity. A couple of exceptions - his video opera “Catatatonics” was featured at the Montreal Film Festival twenty years ago, and recently (2011) his ballet “Three Dubious Memories” was premiered in New York by the Paul Taylor Dance Company. For the rest his compositions and videos clutter his basement in Lenox, Massachusetts where he now lives. For more details and some name-dropping just keep reading... |
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The whole story...
I was born in 1944 in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. My Jewish parents were in hiding and miraculously survived the war. But in 1949 when the communists took over our country my parents decided to emigrate to Israel where my first name was changed from Peter to Elyakim. At age seven I started my piano studies with Edith Kraus, another Czech refugee and a student of Artur Schnabel.  From
the start our relationship was that of a master-disciple. I practically
lived in her house, turned pages in her many concerts, studied
Beethoven sonatas from scores marked by Schnabel, and discussed art and
literature under a signed portrait of Gustav Mahler (Edith was Mahler's
niece).At age eleven I was accepted into the Israeli Academy of Music along with other precocious kids like Pinchas Zukerman. Here I studied chamber music with Alice Fenyves and composition and counterpoint with Mordechai Setter and Alexander Boskovitz.  A few years later I recorded
my first broadcast for Israeli Radio, and later gave my debut recital
in Tel Aviv and with the Israeli Radio Orchestra in Jerusalem (Mozart
concerto K.488).Unlike most young Israeli musicians I did not leave the country for Julliard during my teens and consequently had to serve in the military like everyone else. I was given academic deferment and earned a BA degree in Islamic Studies prior to my three years in the Israeli army -----------> I left Israel at age 24 with dim prospects of making it as a performer because of my age. But encouraged by my new teacher Anton Kuerti at the University of Toronto I decided to give it a try anyway. While still a student I performed the complete six partitas of Bach in two recitals at the university. Debut appearances with the Toronto and Vancouver Symphony orchestras followed (Bartok's third piano concerto). Around this time (1973) I was starting my long stint with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and it was here that I first met my idol Glenn Gould who was editing one of his albums next door to me. I had admired Gould ever since I heard his Goldberg Variations in a live concert in Tel Aviv as a teenager. In later years I had the opportunity to work with Gould on a TV production of Pierot Lunaire and also helped out on his 1975 article for High Fidelity Magazine "The Grass is Always Greener in Outtakes". While working on this last project Gould and I had many late night conversations (actually one-sided monologues) which greatly influenced my future work with technology. My earliest recording projects were mostly chamber music with such artists as violinist Ruggiero Ricci, Bassist Gary Carr, and Contralto Maureen Forester. In 1973 I played my London debut at Wigmore Hall, and back in Canada formed an ensemble that set out to revolutionize chamber music by incorporating speech, costumes, dance, and other media into their concerts. Camerata was an overnight success. The Globe and Mail, Canada's national paper declared: "There has never been anything quite like Camerata".  That same year
Camerata was invited to become ensemble-in-residence at the Shaw
Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake and I was appointed music director of
the festival. Over the next three summers we produced dozens of
concerts and broadcasts there for the CBC radio network. Camerata
represented Canada in many international festivals and in 1976 it was
the first western music group to visit Castro's Cuba, accompanying
Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.At this point I was dividing my time between chamber music and solo appearances. For the CBC I recorded over 200 chamber music broadcasts, including the complete chamber works of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. As a soloist I started working with such conductors as Sir Andrew Davis, Kazuyoshi Akiyama, John Eliot Gardner, Boris Brott, and Arthur Fiedler. Many orchestra managers noticed my ability to prepare a concert on a day's notice and often used me as a substitute for ailing celebrities. I used to joke that I made my career through the misfortune of my more illustrious colleagues.  In 1979 I launched
a music festival in the picturesque Ontario town of Stratford, home of
the Shakespeare Festival, reviving a tradition started almost thirty
years earlier by Glenn Gould, Oscar Shumsky, and Leonard Rose. It was a
grandiose undertaking. Opening day included Handel's Water Music on a
barge in the river Avon that attracted 10,000 spectators, and an
evening concert featuring the National Arts Center Orchestra with Mario
Bernardi, Leonard Rose, Louis Quilico, and the Canadian Brass. The
concert concluded with Beethoven's Choral Fantasia with a massed choir
and myself as soloist. 113 concerts followed, including jazz, folk, and
an after-theater cabaret series. Opening Night at Stratford, Beethoven's Choral Fantasia, National Arts Center Orchestra, Mario Bernardi conducting, Peter Elyakim Taussig soloist <---- After resigning from the festival in 1982 I decided to realize a childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. Films have always been my passion, but having attained a prominent position as a concert pianist, it seemed daunting to embark on a completely different career. Nevertheless, I plunged in. I joined the Ed Video artist cooperative in Guelph, Ontario, where I taught myself the basics of video production. In between concerts I volunteered for a year at a community television station in nearby Kitchener, Ontario, using my original name Peter (instead of Elyakim) as a disguise. As I gained experience, my videos started to be shown in galleries, and eventually in festivals. I still chuckle when I remember people asking me if I was related to the famous pianist Elyakim Taussig. I used to answer that he was my twin. By 1986 I was sufficiently well established in the video world to land a teaching position at the School of Film and Photography of the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronro (now Ryerson University). During the 1980s I also became increasingly fascinated with the role of technology in music and started using computers and synthesizers in my compositions and my videos. Most of my compositions from that period involved electronics (for instace the symphonic children's piece "Braithwaite's Original Brass Band" (1989) commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony and using synthesizers, or my 1990 video opera Catatonics).  with
Erich Kunzel of the Cincinnati Pops<-- My double life as concert pianist (Elyakim Taussig) and filmmaker (Peter Taussig) continued through the 80s. In 1986 I commissioned and premiered "A Hollywood Rhapsody" by Glenn Morley and performed it with the Toronto Symphony under Erich Kunzel. In Vancouver I recorded Beethoven's first Piano Concerto with John Eliot Gardner, and in 1989 I performed another short piano concerto written for me by Pulitzer Prize winning composer Michael Colgrass. As if all this wasn’t varied enough, circumstances around this time lead me to a totally unexpected third career - I became a comedian. Here is how it happened. During my tenure as the director of the Startford Summer Music Festival I produced a comedy recital called “Taussig & Enemies”, a spoof of classical concerts in the Victor Borge mold. Although I am not naturally funny I love comedy, and it was a challenge to see if I could make people laugh onstage.  With the help of colleagues in the theater world, director Fred Thury, Don Ferguson (of the Canadian Air Farce), and the late Heath Lamberts, we created a very funny evening. A few years later an enterprising impresario started booking this show in small towns across Canada, and what started as a lark turned to a career sideline. This in turn led to other performance-art projects, on TV as well as onstage, the best known of which was my 1989 “My Memorial Service” at the Music Gallery in Toronto, in which I lay in state on top of a Steinway. The ads for the show were so convincing that many shocked condolences were sent to my "widow". Taussig &
Enemies
By 1991 I was burnt out. I took a much needed sabbatical from my career and moved into the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Lenox Massachusetts, a residential spiritual community. For the next four years, in the quiet of a monastic environment, I had the opportunity to contemplate my spiritual and future artistic direction. By the time I left the retreat in 1995 I was rejuvenated and a much more balanced person. I had no desire to return to the tumultuous life of a traveling concert artist and turned instead to the exciting new musical frontiers opened by new technologies. In 1996 I was asked by Peter Simon, the president of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto to become the school's technology consultant and for the next few years I designed and implemented a technology curriculum for performing students. For my first post-retreat recording project I chose Bach's Art of the Fugue. But a few months into practicing this daunting work disaster struck in the form of severe Carpal Tunnel Syndrome coupled with Osteoarthritis in my right hand, probably the result of 25 years of pounding the keys and the sudden strain of practicing again. Six months of every conceivable therapy yielded little relief and the prognosis was that I will never again be able to play the piano in any professional way. It seemed that my return to the piano was doomed before it even started. During this dark period a glimmer of hope appeared in the form of a new concert grand piano that could be controlled by a computer and thus allow me to record with my left hand alone. I had an opportunity to try out this new Yamaha Disklavier PRO 9 foot concert grand in New York. Almost instantly I knew that I had found what I was looking for.  The Yamaha Disklavier DCFIII Pro <-- For the next three and a half years I commuted regularly to New York to develop a completely new way of recording the piano, a technique I call "Musical Sculpting". The technique allowed me to record the most complex music with my left hand, one voice at a time, and then shape my phrasing in a computer that was controlling the Disklavier. The Canada Council for the Arts and a private foundation put up the money to cover my expenses. The first CD recorded with "Musical Sculpting" was J.S.Bach's The Art of the Fugue. It was released in June 2000. By then I had expanded the scope of the project to include The Well-Tempered Clavier, which was released in 2002.  PianoKids - Piano
Lessons for the Computer Age
-->
Around that time I started shifting my focus to another arena, also related to music and technology - teaching young children the rudiments of music literacy and piano playing with computers. The result was PianoKids, a research program that spawned a network of teaching studios, operating in elementary schools in western Massachusetts and Ohio that is now in its ninth year. The program improves cognitive and social skills of children ages 6-9 while teaching them to play and compose music using computer technology. 120 students are selected each year to participate in the program. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I feel that in a small way I am continuing the legacy of Glenn Gould, the man who reinvented classical music for the electronic age, and who had the greatest influence on my artistic life. Around 2006 a new diretion started emerging from my work. I noticed that much of the curriculum I was developing had close relationship to logical and mathematical concepts. Over the following couple of years I developed this idea into a full fledged math and music curriculum (and a book on the subject that I keep trying to write). The curriculum was developed in close collaboration with a wonderful mathematics educator and musician, Dr. Paul Goldenberg of EDC (Educational Development Center). Together we have helped establish a pilot program at an Ohio school, the Washington Elementary Math and Music Magnet School near Cleveland, where we tested and implemented the idea that music can improve math comprehension and performance in children K-5.  Paul Goldenberg (on the R.) and myself (on the L.) with our math team at the Math & Music Magnet experimental school in Ohio. <-- A full-time composer at last For the past 30 years, on and off, I have been composing whenever time and opportunity allowed. The output was sporadic at best. But in the past couple of years I have been devoting all my time to composition. It is as if everything up till now was just a preparation for writing music. I write on my laptop and I am fortunate to live at a time when an entire symphonic work can be written, and recorded without the use of actual players. It is a new era for music and I am blessed to be part of it. For a list of compositions and samples go to the composition page. So -- Looking back on the twists and turns of this life, one thing is clear, I will never be able to fill out any form that asks to state my profession on a tiny dotted line. What would I write? Concert pianist, producer, filmmaker, comedian, piano teacher, composer, performance artist, computer programmer? On a bad day I think of myself as a dilettante, jack of all trades, master of none. But then on a good day I see myself more like a navigator, like my hero Magellan, doggedly pursuing inlet after hopeless inlet in his quest to find the right passage. What's next? I wonder...
 Wow! A street named after me: 
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