Today's guest is Chris Donnelly, a Juno-nominated pianist and composer from Toronto, Canada.
What You’re Going to Learn in This Interview
- Ways to integrate musical material into your playing
- Intelligent methods for restricting yourself as a composer and producer
- The benefits of writing music using different mediums—paper, piano, and computer
- Why playing with others early in your musical journey is so valuable
- Chris’s background and music education story
- The importance of practical, hands-on experience when learning
- The often overlooked value of rhythmic studies and developing rhythmic independence
- Techniques to build musical intuition and internalize new material
- How to design exercises that enhance improvisation skills
- An introduction to species counterpoint writing
- Why each key on your instrument has a unique character worth exploring
- How to achieve a state of flow while working on a computer
- The value of play when starting from a blank page
Quotes
“There seemed to be a certain respect for the person who could sit at your desk and write it by hand... there's a little bit of charm about thinking, I've got my ink and a candle and I'm gonna write it this way. That's kind of cool. But, you know, I've been using computers all my life. I've been playing video games all my life. I can achieve so much better flow at the computer because the computer is also my instrument.”
“I think what makes a good composer... isn’t that they can play the piano, but that they just know how to manipulate form.”
“Nobody’s really talking about hand independence. The number one question for a jazz piano player or jazz student is: What the hell do I do with my left hand?”
“One way I’ve been trying to get my students to create their own exercises is: if you look at a pattern and try to reduce it to a sequence—say, a sequence of steps and skips—then create your own sequence, your own pattern. It’s like an algorithm that you’re going to feed into a computer, and out of that is going to come this melodic pattern that you then have to repeat many, many times to get it under your hands.”
Links & Names Mentioned
- Chris Donnelly’s Website
- Chris Donnelly – Videos
- Orff Method
- Kodály Method
- Brad Mehldau
- Sasha Rapoport – University of Toronto
- Russell Hardenberger
- Hand independence techniques and blog posts
- Dave Holland
