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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 the country my parents decided to emigrate to Israel where my first name was changed from Peter to Elyakim. At age 7 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 the niece of Alma Mahler). At age eleven I was accepted into the Israeli Academy of Music
along
with other precocious kids like Pinchas Zukerman. 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".
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, 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.
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 (e.g. my symphonic work "Braithwaite's Original Brass Band" (1989) commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony, and my video opera Catatonics (1990), which was selected for screening at the Montreal International Film and Video Festival). 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.
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.
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. 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 Renaissance man, unburdened by
the
constrains of a single vocation. |
Musical Sculpting® is a registered trademark
of
Taussig Media & Technology,
Disklavier-Pro® is a registered trademark of the Yamaha Corporation
of America
©Copyright, Taussig Media & Technology, 2000
Photos: James Steeber
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since then I have shifted 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 is