A Conversation with

Dorothy Brandwein

Author of our Special Collection: Brandwein’s Ravel Fingerings

July 27, 2022

Michael Clark: I'd love to start at the beginning—what was your early piano training like?

Dorothy Brandwein: Not particularly good! I studied with nuns, as did everybody in my family. I’m from a fairly large Catholic family, and all of us had piano lessons from nuns. But even though I studied with a nun, when I was 15 or 16 I did win a competition that let me play 21 concerts with our Kansas City Philharmonic (now the Kansas City Symphony).

I think someone told my mother, “Maybe Dorothy could have a better teacher,” so that's when I went to the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC) Conservatory, as a high school student, to study with Joanne Baker, the head of the piano department. She is the person I came back to do my doctorate with. I felt like I had not found a teacher back East. When I was in New England, I studied with someone at Yale—he was okay. I studied with Adele Marcus at Juilliard privately—that was, sort of, not okay for a variety of reasons. And finally, I had to decide between organ or piano, because I was giving both organ recitals and piano recitals back East. I decided to come back here to Kansas City and finish what I'd started.

MC: You also studied at the University of Michigan. Who was your teacher there?

DB: Marian Owen—I studied with her for four years. She was a very close friend of Alicia de Larrocha. Marian always talked about Alicia. Some people might not know that Alicia had very small hands—she could barely reach an octave! I imagine that a first inversion chord, major or minor, depending on the black and white keys, was a stretch for her. But of course, we all know how she played! I think she figured out very early on how to adapt very complicated music to her hands. There were times when she would just have to break the octave, but she’d do it with such finesse and such speed. We were always in awe of Alicia de Larrocha, but I’m in more awe now, as I’ve gotten older, am teaching less, and have had the time to explore how she did that.

Even though I did my dissertation back then on Ravel and knew that I couldn't play his music as it was set up on the page, I have been doing a whole lot more of that now, a lot of figuring things out, technical gimmicks. People might see me play a piece they know, and they're used to seeing some quick motion or something that looks a little awkward, and they don't see it, they might think I'm leaving notes out. I'm not! I'm just figuring out how to help my hands help each other out. And it's fun, it's really like solving puzzles. I'm having a lot of fun now as I've taught less and been able to do more of my own music.

MC: Was this approach to fingering something that was introduced to you by your teachers? Do you remember them suggesting these fingerings or were they opposed to it?

DB: They weren't opposed to it. I can't say that a single one of my teachers really explored the technical aspects of making music—it was the music itself, the line, the phrasing, the balance, the pedaling, the interpretation, the nuance. They did not help me with the technical aspect, and I wish that I had been tuned in to what making music felt like and not just what it sounded like, because after I did my doctorate, I developed some hand problems. I did very big pieces such as Liszt’s A Major Concerto and Brahms’ Handel Variations. I think I didn't think about how it felt, and I over-pronated. This is the problem that some of the great pianists had—Graffman, Fleischer—all of a sudden, they hit a brick wall because something was going on with their hand, involuntary muscular twitches and things of that nature. So I did chamber music, but I didn't feel like I wanted to play solo and have to deal with the memorization and how it was feeling.

But now I want to play solo, and I want to know how it feels, and I want to make it as easy as possible—and I'm hoping other people will try to make things easy for them! I think a lot of music can be made easier by thinking about those things. It can have more flow, more fluidity, more nuance, more economy of motion, which I think is all so important to making it look easy. We have to make it look easy so that the physical appearance doesn't get in the way of the beauty that we're trying to create.

So my teachers didn’t help me with my fingerings. It was my idea. I happened to be doing a substantial amount of Ravel, and because I knew I couldn’t play it the way it was written, all of a sudden I realized, “Hey, here's my dissertation topic!”

MC: Would you say that these types of fingerings are just for people with very small hands?

DB: No. My son doesn't have the biggest hand, but he has a wide palm, so he doesn't have a stretch problem, but boy, did he like my fingerings as he worked on his three performance degrees in piano! It just lets you be more in touch with the music itself when you are not scrambling. And it’s the scramble that I have tried to alleviate now in my fingering for Ravel specifically. Beyond the scrambling, sometimes your hands are practically on top of each other. How do you have purity of line when you're just negotiating your hands running into each other while trying to be accurate and trying to be fluid (and of course, fluidity is probably one of the high marks of Ravel’s music, right?)?

So no, these fingerings are not just for those with very small hands, they’re for anyone who finds them helpful. I know my son shared my dissertation with friends of his who were playing Ravel, and they got help from it. So I'm glad, I feel like maybe it was all worth it! It wasn't just a requirement that got me my letters after my name.

MC: I'm curious how being an organist might influence your approach to fingering on the piano.

DB: I only got into really careful fingering when I started organ lessons, and that's because we don't have the sustaining pedal, of course. We have to do a lot of helping, a lot of the music being contrapuntal. We do a lot of redistribution. We have to have legato inner lines; otherwise, it’s choppy. Then I started writing in the fingering, I didn't do that much in piano—I just took it for granted. The organ was very instrumental and teaching me the importance of fingering and redistributing and helping me figure things out like a puzzle.

MC: When did you first start teaching?

DB: I actually started teaching when I was in grade school, but as far as having my own studio, that was when I came back to do my doctorate. When I was at the University of Michigan I went to a little neighboring town and took over somebody’s studio there. I taught at University of Connecticut as a graduate assistant, and then I was on staff, and I taught at UMKC as a graduate assistant, so maybe 55 years of teaching from college until now. I'm not young in years, but I’m still going pretty strong!

MC: You mentioned you've been exploring these kinds of fingerings more now as a performer, but do they play a role in your teaching at all?

DB: They always play a role. I want my students to be totally pianistic in how the notes lay under their hands. I'm always devising things that will make the physical aspect better so that they're not limited in repertoire. For some, their hand size is limited when they're young, especially my son. He was playing a Mozart concerto at age nine, and he didn't have the biggest hands so we had to work out a few tricks. I impress upon my students the importance of always knowing where your hands are on the keyboard and how they can help each other out (I sound like a commercial real estate agent: “Location, location, location!”). I think we owe it to our students. I didn't have that from my teachers, and so I definitely try to give that to my students early in their learning so they don’t get any bad habits.

MC: What are some of the highlights of your musical life in Kansas City?

DB: Besides getting to play a bunch of concerts with the Kansas City Philharmonic in high school, I did win the UMKC concerto competition playing Liszt’s A major Concerto. I was pregnant with my son when I auditioned, and then he was in the balcony of the concert hall for the performance. At one poignant moment after a big cadenza, there was silence and my son went [cute little noise]! That might sound silly, but that was one of my big highlights.

I started doing a lot of chamber music because I felt like the solo piano repertoire ran its course for a while until I figured out what was going on with my hands—specifically my right hand, which is the smaller hand, and the one that I used and abused, possibly because I wasn't thinking about how I was using it and how to relax. I started the Classical Muse Ensemble, which was flute, cello, and piano or harpsichord. We did a lot of Baroque music with harpsichord, but then we also did a lot of contemporary and classical music.

I am extremely grateful that I have been able to help others make music for all my life—being a choir director, being a vocal coach, being an accompanist, being a chamber musician. It's very satisfying to me. I taught at a local university for a couple of years, but I just decided to be a self-employed musician, as well as a church musician—I'll never regret that. My students did very well and always got high scores in competitions, so I'm very satisfied that I can give that away.

MC: If you could meet one composer or pianist from the past in person, who would it be?

DB: I think I'd probably want to meet Brahms. He was a tragic personality, and I find his music has that type of depth. I love bass lines because of Brahms. I've done a lot of Brahms’ chamber music. His trios are just a piece of heaven to me, so I think it would be Brahms. I guess I just identify with Brahms, soulfully.

MC: I believe Joanne Baker had a pedagogical lineage that connects to Brahms. Is that right?

DB: She did! Yes, she studied with Carl Friedberg who was Brahms’ pupil. Maybe that's why I loved doing Brahms with her!

MC: Do you have any other memories of Joanne Baker you'd like to share?

Joanne passed away in 2004. She was a woman who was held in such high esteem. She sadly was not able to continue a performance career because she got arthritis in her hands, so it wasn't her fault that we didn't talk about technique—she could not demonstrate. She was in great demand to adjudicate piano competitions. She started going over to Beijing, and every time she’d make her trip, she might be gone two or three weeks at a time, so she would hire me to teach her students. Those were mostly master’s and doctoral students doing fabulous repertoire that you wouldn't have the normal high school student doing, so that was a lot of fun.

Joanne Baker was a teacher who cared as much about the person as she did about their talent. She never only worked with the talent. She felt that her access to that talent and to that musical soul was through the person himself, emotionally and psychologically through that person, so she always had an ear for whatever you needed to share with her. Then she would have some good advice, and then we’d get on to the music.

She built an incredible sense of trust and confidence between herself and her students. She never just picked the best students that came to audition for her, and it was a coup to get to study with her. She was always interested in what was on the inside, and if they didn't quite have it on the outside with their technique, she knew she could deal with that. She had to make sure there was a lot on the inside. That was her criteria for choosing her students, what they had innately. I think it was very much her joy and pleasure to bring that out. If you heard the same Beethoven sonata in studio class from three different people, it sounded like three different pieces. I appreciated that so much—there was never carbon copy.

MC: Is there anything else you’d like to share about teaching?

DB: I'd like teachers to pay attention to their students and how they use their equipment—how they use their wrists, their elbows, their shoulders, how they navigate the keyboard—because from what I've read, injuries are more and more common. And we as teachers owe it to our students to be observant from the very beginning. Granted, we don't all get students at the very beginning. Some of us don't want to teach students from the very beginning, but I mean, when they first come to us.

Sometimes it's best to warn a student and say, “It's going to take about a year before you're going to get what I'm talking about. So just be patient, and I promise I'll be patient, but there are certain things I'm not going to let up on. And that's trying to learn how to play without tension and how to produce a beautiful, full sound.”

I think that we need to always watch out for our students technically. Otherwise they get into harder and harder music, and it becomes more physically hard, and then they tend to drop back just because it takes forever, and then it still doesn't feel easy to play. That's our responsibility as a teacher.

MC: This has been a wonderful conversation! I really appreciate all you've shared.

DB: Thank you so much for sharing my work in this way. That is a phenomenal gift you are giving because there are pianists that take the score literally. My adult student is doing Ravel’s Pavane. He thinks he has to take it literally, and it’s practically impossible to do that. You just have to help out! Then they start seeing things so differently.

I always say, it's written like this on the page almost to make orchestral sense, like when you look at an open score and you have a line for the flutes and the clarinets and the violins. It has to make sense on the page. So I just say, don't take it the way it looks. Find out the way it feels and how one hand can help the other.

Explore Brandwein’s Ravel Fingerings