When a pianist's hands stop working

One of our best-known artists has found a way to keep making music

NEW YORK - Peter Elyakim Taussig is back where he belongs, at the keyboard of a concert piano, and we are smiling beatifically as the crystal clear notes of a Bach fugue fill the air. They seem to leap and dance and chase each other around the studio in that mysterious and almost perfect sequence that has enchanted the world since Johann Sebastian himself was tickling the ivories 300 years ago.
But the funny thing is that Taussig's hands, revered for their skills since his days as one of Canada's best-known classical pianists, in the '70s and '80s, are lying quite still in his lap.

The piano keys are popping up and down, the hammers whacking and plinking, and the finely tuned strings vibrating accordingly, but Taussig's hands are still. It is as if a ghost is at work. But Taussig is actually responsible for every subtle tone and pause.
He has set the whole thing off with a slightly stiff prod on the index finger of his left hand, striking not a piano key but rather the enter button on a laptop computer planted above his keyboard.

He has programmed the computer, and the computer is now playing the piano for him. With the help of Yamaha and its latest in whiz-bang musical technology, he has created the ultimate player piano. He will demonstrate the phenomenon at a special seminar, HumanVoice/ComputerVox, at the Centre for the Arts festival in Banff, Alta., on Saturday, and has produced a CD, The Art of the Fugue.

This might not be quite the same as wooing hearts and soothing souls with the immediacy and the vulnerability that come with a live stage performance, but to Taussig it is a miracle. Five years ago, he lost the full use of his hands, the tools that matter most to a pianist. He had taken a long sabbatical from his piano and, with a self-indulgence he came to regret, disappeared into a monastic retreat for yoga in Massachusetts. He stayed for five years. When he went back to work, something snapped. His fingers tingled and went numb, and a blinding pain seemed to emanate from the centre of his palms.

"This was a cosmic joke," he says. "I get through an embarrassing mid-life crisis, I get back to work with a vengeance, and then this happens and I can't even hold a tea cup. I was just crushed. "What happened was that Taussig, now 57, had been struck with a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome, a condition in which the bones of the wrist constrict, clamping on the nerves; it is a common form of repetitive stress injury. Much of the damage may have been done as Taussig played through the height of his career. Then, when he went back to work, it would have flared up.
"It is like an athlete coming back after getting out of condition and thinking he can go straight back to his former performance," he says. "I think it was the sudden strain that did it."

An attack of arthritis followed, and to this day Taussig has only partial use of his hands, and nowhere near the strength and flexibility required for his music.

"The pain was so bad that for years I could not sleep though the night," he continues. "It is a sign of my despair that I ended up going to a strange Japanese doctor here in New York, and he was the only one who seemed able to do anything. He mumbled incantations, pulled my earlobes and pressed his fingers into the top of my head. That night was the first time I slept for years."

Taussig, it seemed, had payed a terrible price for his impetuous move to the yoga retreat. Until then, his life had been one straight road to success.
He had always seemed unusually blessed. For a start, he was fortunate to be living at all, for he was born in Czechoslovakia to a family who were among the small minority of Jews to survive the Nazi terror. His mother had looked sufficiently Caucasian to have survived in the open, posing as a member of a Catholic family in the old German community of Bratislava -- Taussig is a German name -- while her husband spent the occupation in hiding. He was an industrialist, and in the wake of the German defeat he went back to his factory.

When Stalin's Communists hijacked Czechoslovakia and the Cold War set in, the family finally fled, and Taussig grew up in Israel. He never took to Israel, however, and his sense of alienation came to a head when he served in the army during the Six Day War.

"I was given a desk job because I was a pacifist, and it was obvious that I would have been inept at killing people," he says. "It was during military service that I made the decision to leave Israel and go as far away as possible as soon as possible." It was not long before he found himself studying music at the University of Toronto, under Anton Kuerti. He had discovered his new home.

"Canada just clicked. It felt right from the start, there was lots of money around for the arts, and my career just took off," he says.
"I had a pretty big career, playing everything, recording a lot with the CBC, making money. So why did I quit? I just found myself thinking: What is the point? There has to be more to life than this -- running around, living in hotel rooms, working."

He found a sort of peace at the yoga camp. Perhaps the biggest benefit, he thinks, was turning his back on material success. He sold a large house in Toronto, put boxes and boxes of possessions into storage, and lived in a single, plain white room with his wife, concert pianist Kathryn Root, and their daughter, then 10. "It was wonderful discovering life without possessions -- or ambitions."

And now Taussig is convinced that even his injury is turning out to be a blessing. "I have lived a charmed life," he says. "Think of it: If I had not been injured, I would never have discovered this new way of creating music, and it is a music which is allowing my imagination to go beyond the limits of the abilities of my hands.

"We are rediscovering the intentions of the composer," he says, "finding out how far he imagines he could go." He demonstrates by calling up a section of Bach script he has programmed into the computer. Each note appears on the screen as a vertical bar, and Taussig can determine the tempo, volume and duration of each with deft movements of his mouse. It took him three years to program and then play The Art of the Fugue, but now, within a few seconds, he can radically alter the tone of a phrase.

He stabs at the enter key again and the ivories start to dance at a frantic pace. Each note still emerges clear and whole, but Taussig is demonstrating how the computer can play at a speed, and with a clarity and range, that would simply be physically beyond even the largest pair of hands. A low note holds on the far left while ghostly hands work intricate notes way out of normal reach on the right.

"The good things in my life," he muses, "have not been the result of planning." He discovered Yamaha and its strange experiments with concert pianos only after years of treatment had produced just enough movement in his hands to operate a computer keyboard. By that time he had turned toward electronic music -- which he had taught in Toronto even at the height of his concert career -- but was frustrated by the dead tones produced by electronic rather than mechanical instruments.

Yamaha had begun experimenting with its Disklavier, a piano fitted with a complex, extremely sensitive device that operates the keys. It sits above the hammers, just below the lid, and looks like an elongated boom box.

Yamaha has given Taussig a studio in New York and a Disklavier for his personal use, in return for the right to learn from his musical experiments. While he uses one that must be played with his computer, he takes me to a showroom where an astonishing Yamaha Grand not only plays old showbiz standards at the touch of a button, but sings them from an invisible recorder, too.

At this point it seems as if Taussig is involved in some sort of strange experiment in which Las Vegas cabaret meets local karaoke bar, and there are those in the music world who have deemed his efforts fundamentally false. "I have invented nothing," he answers. "But I am learning to use a new technology and seeing what we can do with it musically.

The difference here is that these instruments allow us for the first time to take each element of this great glob of music and use it quite separately to make a perfect, clear sound. We are making music through recording -- a new art form, rather than just recording what is still essentially a live performance."

One reviewer flatly refused to listen to The Art of the Fugue. Music teachers, Taussig says, are "terrified" because the Disklaviers offer a chance to make music without first devoting "half a lifetime to mastering the instrument." And there are those who, in the end, are simply saying that Taussig is defiling the purity of classical music.

"But this is not the worship of dead music," he counters. "It is finding out what Bach had in his imagination, beyond even his ability to play it, and in doing that we are looking for a sacred truth."