CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign piano professor Rochelle Sennet recently commented on a student’s playing, Sennet was seated at a piano in Foellinger Great Hall at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts while the student was 135 miles away at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago. Yet they could experience one another’s playing as though their pianos were side by side in the same room.
During Sennet’s lesson with Roosevelt student Tina Hsieh, Sennet could see the keys and pedals move on the piano at Krannert Center as Hsieh played the remote piano. After Hsieh finished playing J.S. Bach’s “Toccata in C minor,” Sennet urged her to play one of the chords in the piece as full and as quickly as she could. Sennet demonstrated, and Hsieh jumped as the sound came out of the piano in front of her.
The lesson was part of a Jan. 29 piano masterclass using the technology of the Yamaha Disklavier DCFX concert grand piano. Sennet, Chi-Chen Wu, a piano professor who is the chair of the keyboard area for the U. of I.’s School of Music, and two Roosevelt University professors taught separate lessons to two Illinois students and two Roosevelt students. Sennet previously partnered with the University of Memphis for a remote masterclass using the piano’s technology.
The Disklavier pianos they were using are built with optic sensors that record when a piano key or foot pedal is pressed and how fast they are moving up and down. The piano measures 1,024 levels of sensitivity for each key and 256 levels for each pedal, said Kirk Davis, a Yamaha Corp. district manager for higher education who attended the masterclass. The data from the piano being played is turned into code and sent to Yamaha’s main server in Japan, he said. Disklavier pianos connect to one another through the server, and the exact performance on one piano is reproduced on the other.
“I can hear exactly what’s coming out of the instrument. It provides more information than an audio recording because I can see it,” Sennet said.
Sennet said it is important for students to be exposed to technology, including this one, which “is very much at the forefront of conversations” by pianists.
She said using the newest teaching tools gives students a leg up in a very competitive job market.
In addition to teaching remote lessons, the piano has advantages for in-person lessons – for example, in teaching pedal strokes, Sennet said.
“A student can look at your foot but they can’t tell how far down to go with the pedal. There’s something great about not just telling them based on sound, but in them physically knowing that,” she said.
Pianists can record themselves on the piano as they practice and play it back to critique their performance. Technology like this allows music schools to hold remote auditions rather than flying a student to a school; record accompaniment for a vocalist who needs to rehearse; and record a concert for a remote audience. Composers who are creating a new work can use the piano’s software to transcribe the notes automatically for them. Sennet said she is interested in how researchers in the sciences who use sound in their work might use the piano.
Yamaha loaned the Disklavier piano to Sennet, who is a Yamaha Artist, for her to record the final three-disc set of her Bach to Black project last year. “Bach to Black: Suites for Piano, Volume III” was released Feb. 1 by Albany Records. It is the final set of a series of three recordings that pairs Bach’s keyboard suites with compositions from Black composers. The project aims to broaden the audience for the music of both Bach and Black composers, challenge expectations about music written by Black composers and encourage conversations about inclusion and diversity in classical music.
The most recent recording features the complete French Suites and the French Overture in B Minor by Bach, and suites by four Black female composers: Margaret Bonds, Nkeiru Okoye, Betty Jackson King and Montague Ring – a pseudonym for Amanda Aldridge. The recording also features world premieres of two works that have not been recorded previously, by Adolphus Hailstork and by James Lee III, as well as a suite by William Grant Still.