placeNovi Sad, Serbia
Born in Montreal in 1955 Alan Fraser studied piano but also delved into composition, cello, classical singing and had several stints as a pop musician. Alan’s main pianistic influence was the pioneering research of Phil Cohen who studied alongside Ronald Turini, Andre Laplante and Janina Fialkowska with Yvonne Hubert, who had been Cortot‘s assistant in Paris. Alan spent several years with Cohen after an apprenticeship with two former Cohen students, Alan Belkin and Lauretta Milkman.
Soften the blow by standing up and get the purer vibration of the string
By giving it a posture or "acture" as Alan says
While the fingers do their thing
One of the goals in this floating melodic singing, not chipped up sound
Arm weight with arm skeleton
The more security you can feel in your hand, it reflects on the whole playing apparatus
Alan talks about the one year pre-standing apprenticeship which we have all gone through and how it applies to piano
Piano is a percussion instrument. What kind of sound we get back depents of a kind of touch we provide
Develop capcacity to deal with the key
This is how you phrase at the piano
You can't think horizontally if you play the piano vertically
And use our ears and play the music
It's not only the hands are involved in rotation process but the whole body
What if we applied the science of human walking to the hand rotation