We recently connected with Myron Silberstein and have shared our conversation below.

Myron, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

My ongoing project is to bring attention to composers who have been largely forgotten since their deaths. I have recorded first performances of music by Peter Mennin (former president of Juilliard), Norman Lloyd (former dean of Oberlin), and Vittorio Giannini (founder of the North Carolina School of the Arts). Peter Mennin’s piano sonata was composed in 1963 and had languished in library stacks for half a century when I recorded it. After I recorded pieces by Norman Lloyd, I received a lovely note from his granddaughter, who never anticipated that her grandfather’s music would make it onto CD.

Though Giannini was a prominent composer during his lifetime, much of his music remains unpublished. Over the past 25 years, I have had the opportunity to examine many of his manuscripts, acquire long-out-of-print editions of his music, and become familiar with many pieces that have never been performed or that have been unheard since their first performances in the mid-1900s. Giannini is a composer who is very much in need of a reassessment. My colleague Walter Simmons included a crucial chapter on Giannini in his book “Voices in the Wilderness” that has begun that reassessment. I am in the process of preparing an article about his most forgotten works.

My newest recording project is of 25 etudes and three large-scale “Narratives” by Paul Creston. Creston had been considered one of the most promising American composers of the 1930s and 1940s but became increasingly peripheral as concert programming steered away from contemporary Romantic composers. His “Narratives” were written in 1962; only two of them were ever performed publicly, and none have been recorded. The 123 etudes of “Rhythmicon” systematically demonstrate the concepts of rhythm that were fundamental to Creston’s writing. Much like Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos,” the Rhythmicon begins on an elementary level and proceeds rapidly to virtuosic concert pieces. None have been recorded. But I cannot imagine more lush, delightful, exciting music than the pieces I will be introducing to listeners through this recording.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a Chicago-based pianist, piano teacher, and composer. My solo career centers around neglected composers from the mid-1900s onward whose aesthetic principles prioritized personal expression and traditionally beautiful melody over musical experimentation. My work as a composer continues that tradition. It is readily understood by non-specialists but is also informed by my grasp of the full range of music history from the pre-Renaissance to today.

Since I work closely with singers, a good portion of my music is vocal. I have written numerous song cycles and standalone songs and am currently writing an opera to my own libretto, based on “The Prophetic Pictures” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The story is about a newly married couple who commission a portrait from a painter who is rumored to be able to see into people’s souls and seal their fate via prophecies inscribed in the resulting paintings. Aside from the story’s inherent drama, I chose it because it offers the opportunity to compose arias about art–about what art can and cannot do; about what art means to the creator and to the consumer.

I love working with living poets. One of my first song cycles, “This Blue Dark,” was a setting of four texts by the British poet Chloe Stopa-Hunt, written when the soprano for whom I was writing, Anne Slovin, shared our interest in finding poetry expressing a first-person perspective of classical female mythological figures. Mythology and classical languages are also a strong interest of mine. I studied Sanskrit intensely throughout my undergraduate and graduate education and composed a setting of the Shanti-Patha, which soprano Chelsea Hollow recently premiered. I eventually hope to write an opera based on portions of the Katha-Sarit-Sagara (Ocean of Story), which I translated in the early 2000s.

My piano teaching communicates the common-sense techniques that I myself was taught: how to practice efficiently; how the piano is built and what physical techniques take best advantage of its structure; how to memorize music; how to prepare for public performance. Communicating this knowledge in straightforward, practical terms, while also finding metaphors and images that resonate with each student’s individual perspective, is my greatest skill as a teacher. Music goes beyond language, but teaching requires a very precise use of language.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

My piano studies as a young adult were designed to develop me as a traditional pianist: a competition winner headed toward a career as a generalist. Though I always favored unusual and neglected music, my teacher warned me that niche pianists are not taken seriously–it would be assumed that I played unfamiliar repertoire solely because I wasn’t very good at standard repertoire. Perhaps this was true in the 1990s, or perhaps it was bad advice. But I did learn plenty of standard repertoire and attempted, one by one, to check the boxes that would lead to a traditional career. Despite a debut CD with truly excellent reviews and an ever-growing resume of concerts, I couldn’t find a single manager interested in me, and I decided in 1997 that I was unwilling to invest more money in additional recordings and other collateral that may or may not move my career forward. Instead, at the age of 23, I enrolled in college (with a full scholarship, which I attribute to having an intriguing personal history as much to having a respectable high school transcript) undeclared. I eventually became a philosophy and religious studies major, graduated having already published several academic papers, and moved on to an interdisciplinary PhD program.

But after earning my MA, I became curious what opportunities might be available in music. I quickly became one of the pianists for a local art song organization that specialized in unusual repertoire. I was now 31 years old, which made me too old for (or, rather, free of the dictates of) young artist competitions, and I was in a milieu where my musical interests were right at home. I decided to concentrate on those interests and to become exactly what I was warned not to be–a niche pianist.

This has offered the opportunity to reevaluate my role and motivations as an artist. I can play standard repertoire well–the Franck “Prelude, Choral, and Fugue” on my debut CD earned very favorable critical attention. But Franck doesn’t need my assistance in being recognized as an important musical figure. Giannini does. I will never be a platinum-selling household-name pianist. But I do feel that the few hundred (rather than many thousands of) people who have my CDs on their shelves get unique value from them: they fill a gap in their listening repertoire–sometimes a gap they have waited many years to fill. I’m performing a genuine service, and one that speaks directly to what have always been my primary musical interests.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

The arts need to be a priority in public education. It would be marvelous if the arts were also elevated in pop culture as well. I think it’s a good thing that Bugs Bunny cartoons featured Liszt Hungarian rhapsodies. I think it’s wonderful that Hollywood films featured soundtracks by Bernard Herrmann. And in no way do I think this means that cartoons and movies today need to exclusively feature 19th century, Western, dead-white-man creativity. But what I do think is that there is a de-emphasis on content of deep emotional expression in much of everyday life. It’s not so much the familiarization with canonical musical history that needs to re-enter the daily landscape as it is the elevation of content that communicates complex personal feelings.

The biggest challenge I find among my students is not technical progress. Anyone can learn how to move their fingers effectively on a keyboard. The difficulty my students encounter is emotional freedom: doing something more than simply playing the notes that are written on the page; asking themselves the question of how the music speaks to them and how they want to speak through the music.

Just as much as budgeting more grants for artists (which of course I support) or sponsoring more performance venues (which of course I support), if artistic, expressive thought and feeling were simply more part of everyday life–the formal, professional, finely honed creation of art would naturally become more central to society.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://myronsilberstein.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/myron-silberstein-5272bb1b1/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MyronSilberstei
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq2ljwqXywcWAtTVWXvPKJQ

Image Credits
Daniel Johanson Myron Silberstein Michelle Smith