The composer Bruce Adolphe first met Yo-Yo Ma at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1970. Mr. Ma was just 15 years old at the time (though he’d already played for J.F.K. at the White House). Mr. Adolphe had just written his first cello piece. “Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing,” Mr. Adolphe remembers. “I’d never written for the instrument before.”
Mr. Adolphe had shown a draft of his composition to a Juilliard instructor, who informed him that the piece featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Mr. Adolphe could correct the music, however, Mr. Ma decided to rehearse the composition in his dorm room. “Yo-Yo played through my piece, sight-reading the whole thing,” Mr. Adolphe says. “And when that impossible chord came, he somehow found a way to play it.”
Jonah Lehrer’s How To Be Creative piece in the Wall Street Journal shares that anecdote about composer Bruce Adolphe, who is best known around these parts as the man behind the Piano Puzzler on Performance Today.
You should subscribe to the Piano Puzzler podcast on iTunes.
-
wandering-albatross reblogged this from americanpublicmedia
-
americanpublicmedia posted this
