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From Our Hearts to Your Ears
Our mission is to offer recordings which provide a beautiful and inspiring example to young musicians. We select repertoire that is widely used by music teachers, and which we teach to our own students. There are many, many pieces we plan to add as we expand our catalog. We hope that PlayMyPiece will serve not only as a source of recordings, but also as a source of repertoire ideas for teachers.
Language And Music
We take our lead from the Suzuki philosophy which likens learning music to learning a language. Just as one would not learn a language by listening to tapes of a stilted, non-native speaker, we felt one would not listen to music recordings that are "dumbed down". We gave a lot of thought to the interpretation of the works recorded here, including issues of whether to use vibrato in the most elementary works, what fingerings to use, and whether to play more slowly because a student might. We decided to use subtle vibrato in even the most elementary works. We do keep the tempi moderate, but we allow ourselves the full range of our natural expression. The great majority of our fingerings are those a student would use. This includes the use of many open strings in singing passages.
Instruments and Recording Equipment
Mr. Brickman plays a violin from the shop of Samuel Zygmuntowicz and Ms. Sunwoo's instrument is by Samuel Nemessanyi. Both players use bows by Charles Espey. Mr. Salmirs is heard playing a Steinway concert grand piano. To record we use Taylor Hohendahl Engineering (T.H.E.) and Microtech Gefell microphones, an RME Fireface 800, and a Macbook Pro. All recording and editing are done using Steinberg's "Cubase 4". Reverb, which is minimal, is added with a Lexicon 300. The mics are placed to achieve a highly detailed and realistic sound. We like hearing every nuance when we listen to recordings and imagine that our PMP audience will also enjoy this "up close" quality. This approach necessarily allows extra-musical sounds, such as breathing and the percussive sound of fingers on the fingerboard, to be audible. Again, we like that and hope that you will too.
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