Sara Davis Buechner | Pianist

I spoke with Sara Davis Buechner in the summer of 2020 more or less at the beginning of the global shut down. Shamefully, it has taken almost a full year to transcribe our conversation and post it. However, as I was reading back through our discussion, I was transported to our zoom call. There is a very palpable energy in Sara that is apparent even in reading the text. It was a funny, joyful, and engaging chat and I truly wish you all to read it so that you too can pick up on that humour and joy.

I remember seeing Sara play here in Halifax several years ago and thinking how wonderful and exciting a performance it was. Like so many of us, I hear so many concerts and some are great. Many are very forgettable. Sara’s was not forgettable.

{Jacob} - I wanted to start with a bit of a repertoire talk, because it comes from – and I swear with all honesty, this is not purely just to butter you up – but I spent my last two weeks adjudicating for a festival in Canada – the Canadian Music Competition. There were about 200 young musicians all online, of course, so I was just listening to these videos. There were three, four dozen Haydn and Mozart sonatas. Normally I sit on the side of new music. Most of my work is on the strange and weird and new side. And so I spent so long listening to these kids play – very, very well – Mozart and Haydn, and then I started putting on your recordings, and I, without any trouble, beautifully sat and listened to your Haydn and Mozart because they were just so full of actual verve and life and so much excitement and clarity that, even after listening for two weeks of 200 musicians playing Haydn, Mozart, pretty well but sometimes horribly, I was just so thrilled to sit and listen to yours. It was very, very refreshing.

{Sara} - Oh, that's very sweet.

{Jacob} - So on the repertoire side, can you tell me about what you play and why? How do you – I mean, you play a lot of Mozart, and I've listened to you talk about Mozart a fair amount, but why do you pick the repertoire you pick?

{Sara} - That's, of course, yeah, a terrific place to start, because pianists, I think, unlike a lot of other instrumentalists, we have such a vast repertoire. You know, not to say instruments like violin and cello don't have large repertoires, but nothing really like the keyboard. We literally have five centuries of music to choose from. So a lot of that repertoire choice, it may not even be choice as much as what it is you're exposed to as a youngster – you know, what gets to enter your head from an earliest age. So starting with Mozart, which is the place I always start, this was the music I recall hearing when I was three or four years old, that just elicited a kind of electricity in me. There was an afternoon radio show at 4:30 in the afternoon, and my mother noticed that I would walk to the living room radio precisely at that time to hear this, and it always started with the overture to "Marriage of Figaro." I have to say that still gets me – the minute I think of it, I mean, look at my hands, I just start to flutter. There's some sort of electrical charge to that. It's kind of the spark of life itself, you might want to call it. I'm sure that wasn't the first music I heard, because my mother was an amateur pianist, and it was usually after she put me in the crib she'd play the piano a little bit. She'd play a mix of stuff, you know, a couple of the easy Chopin preludes, the songs of Jerome Kern – Broadway themes, whatever. And I always liked that stuff, but this Mozart was something very, very … very, very different. 

So, you know, that is just something that is so intrinsic to my core, and I'm lucky, I think, also, that perhaps I was spared hearing pop music when I was a kid, which was – as soon as I went to school, I realized people, classmates I had, didn't listen to the kind of music I listened to. This was directly because of my mother, who had grown up in difficult circumstances, and my father, who was really – both of them had barely finished high school. My mother had this kind of common American dream at that time that her children should do better than she did, and she made our house a kind of a cultural place. We had art books; we had paintings. I mean, these great paintings on the wall were all borrowed from the library, because the library had some loan system. You could decorate your house with those things. We had paperback editions of good books, and we had an encyclopedia that came one letter each month. Various things like this. See, she wanted her kids to have a wider world, a richer cultural experience, a richer artistic experience, and bigger possibilities. And for me, the music really took hold. For my brother it was science. He's a professor of biochemistry now. So we kind of took what we wanted. 

But circling back to your question about the repertoire, you know, Mozart was the beginning. And I was also very, very blessed that I had the best possible teachers. I don't mean they were the biggest names or the most famous teachers or whatever, but my very first teacher was a Hungarian refugee. She was probably about 19 years old when she was teaching me. She had escaped from Hungary with her parents during the Revolution of 1956, literally with bullets whizzing over her head, and she ran barefoot out in the country. And after two or three years studying with her, she took me to her teacher, who was a marvellous Filipino pianist named Reynaldo Reyes who lived in Baltimore. And Reynaldo spoke about eight languages. He was trained at the Paris Conservatoire. And I think it was very much from him that I got my taste for all the reaches of the repertoire. He played the classics that we know and love: Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and so forth. So in the middle of the lesson the phone would ring, and you really had no idea what language was next going to come out of his mouth: It could be English; it could be Spanish; it could be Italian; it could be French; it could be German; it could be Greek; it could be a little bit of Russian. Or Tagalog, his native language. 

He'd dance around the room to illustrate a point; he'd talk about the history of some word or tell you what that word was in French and German and Italian, what was that. And I sort of felt like his teaching studio was like this little United Nations. It was technicolor in there. It was exciting; it was alive; it was huge. And it was a little tiny studio at Towson State College. It wasn't even a university then. But what a contrast to my home, which was in the suburbs of Baltimore, which was literally out of a black-and-white sitcom. I mean, it looked like "Leave It to Beaver" land where I grew up. It was all white. It was racist Baltimore in the early 1960s. We lived in a white, lower-middle-class, maybe even upper-poor, bubble. And if I had not had that music to literally come and swoop me like Cinderella off my feet, I don't know what I would have ended up doing in life, you know. I don't know what my little classmates are up to now, what kind of world they grew up into, but for me it was, you know, kind of an entrée into – I think a few years ago, there was the common phrase, or maybe it was a hashtag, "It gets better." Something like that. The piano lessons were "It gets better" for me. There was something out there that was much bigger than the Baltimore suburbs. 

My teacher made us get subscription tickets to the Baltimore Symphony. On Wednesday night my dad would take me to the symphony, and it was like, technicolor. I mean, my God, you know, that fantastic music in the packed hall, no air conditioning, sweltering in the summer, with Beethoven symphonies. It was just fantastic. It was so vivid. So this appetite for music in all its vivacity and its excitement and its colour and its glory, this was really fostered in me. I think it was when I went to college, when I went to Juilliard, I started to really attain a deeper taste for more exotic repertoire, or the limitless bounds of piano repertoire. In Baltimore I didn't have access to great music libraries per se, you know, and my teacher gave me – you know, pretty much assigned me things to learn. He knew I loved Mozart, so he gave lots of Mozart. I learned almost everything of Chopin before I even got college. That was big. This was big. Debussy was big. He was not into anything written out after 1920, 1930, so Bartók was adventurous to me. I was just 16 when I went to college. And in New York – well, New York City plus Juilliard plus, I don't know, all kinds of things, just sort of exploded my brain. 

At Juilliard I met an amazing teacher but he was not my piano teacher; he was the piano literature teacher. His name was Joseph Bloch. And Mr. Bloch was an absolutely astounding man. He was out of a 1940s movie or something like that. He was definitely closeted. He never talked about that, but it was really funny that, years after I had been a student and years after my own transition and so forth, that while he was in his 90s, at the end of his life, I would always visit him when I came to New York. He never spoke of his sexuality. He was married; he had children; he had a family. But it was kind of understood. It was something that connected us. It was part of our real connection, and he just adored me. He left me a something after he passed away. His son called me up and said, "Oh, I have something that Dad wanted to give you." And when I went to pick it up, it was a beautiful Japanese print. Joseph Bloch had served in the U.S. Army during the occupation years of Japan. Joseph Bloch loved Asia. He travelled a lot. And he knew that I loved Japan and I spoke some Japanese and so forth. So I thought, that was nice. It was nice. And when I got home, I showed it to my spouse, Kayoko. And she says, "I think that's a Munakata." Which was an artist I didn't know at that time; looked it up. That little print, I had just committed an extremely illegal act. I'd carried a $15,000 woodblock print across the border to Canada and then had to take it with me again when I returned to the United States. So I owe somebody about $30,000, but that's all right.

Anyway, well, I mention Joseph Bloch, first of all because of the queer connection, but second of all, more important, the musical connection. He was always someone who travelled a lot. He travelled all the time, and he was gone half the year travelling. And he didn't go to France or Germany. He went to Fiji. He went to Borneo. He went to Okinawa. He went to Tehran. He went places that nobody else went and he played concerts. He wasn't really a practising pianist. I mean, certainly he had been a Juilliard student himself and he could play, but he was not a virtuoso player, but boy, did he love to travel. And he had a very theatrical kind of presentation voice which kind of gave him away, you know. He always held his hand around here. He'd say, "Well, what have you brought me today?" very theatrically, when I came into his classroom. But one of my favourite memories of Joseph Bloch was, when he came into the piano lit class, he'd kick the door in with his foot so it'd make a huge sound. A big, heavy door. Bam! Walks in, comes in. Strides in with his hand like that and he says, "I've just returned from Fiji. And you?" 

{Jacob} – How absolutely fabulous. 

{Sara} - I mean, there were people who really didn't like that affected thing, but I adored it, and he made us feel sort of insignificant, but also, me, very, very hungry, you know. I mean, he would talk about the glories of some completely obscure, or lesser, French composer – let's say Reynaldo Hahn. He'd go on and on. He knew it inside and out. And you'd say, "Wow, I gotta get to know that." So in my first couple of years at Juilliard, my real piano teacher – I won't tell you his name. He had been a very famous pianist in the 1930s, but by 1976 he was an alcoholic and not in good shape. And he was not a – he wasn't an abusive teacher, but he wasn't a good teacher. He slept in a lot of lessons, and he fell down once, and that's something that isn't happening in colleges anymore. You know, today you would go right to the dean and say, "My teacher has a serious problem, needs some help." We became his enablers. We used to pick him up and help him because he was genuinely a sweet man. I liked him, but I wasn't learning anything. And I looked around for other teachers outside the school, as many students did. There was a lot of very old teachers at Juilliard at that time... But I also thought to myself, "Well, I have resources. This is The Juilliard School in New York. There's got to be something I can learn here." And I actually started going to *gasp* the library.

{Jacob} – Imagine! 

{Sara} - We had a magnificent library. My teacher Mr. Reyes in Baltimore, was a fantastic sight reader, and he would accompany the Metropolitan Opera auditions. They would always hire him down in Washington when they had these finals, because literally, this man, he was so well trained at the Paris Conservatoire in these kind of skills. A singer he didn't know would be backstage; she's about to sing five songs. She'd hand him some Schubert and say, "Can you play this one up a third?" No problem. "Can you play this Duparc a fourth lower?" No problem. This man could sight read anything in any key. It was unreal, you know, the skill that he had. When I got to Juilliard, boy, I didn't know much repertoire. I heard great pianists up and down the hallways, in the next practice room from me all the time. And I thought, well, I don't know my repertoire, so how about learning how to sight read? So, for the first two years I was there, I would go to the library and take out a few volumes in alphabetical order, and I remember starting with the "Rhapsody No. 2" of Isidore Atron, and finishing up two years later at the end of the sixth shelf of piano scores with Efrem Zimbalist's piano concerto, which is not a very good piece. I skipped a few composers I didn't like very much – like Prokofiev, actually.

{Jacob} – Oh that’s very surprising to me. 

{Sara} - I'm not too much of a Prokofiev, or Shostakovitch fan. But doing this, first of all, it improved my technique a thousand percent, and I now plead and beg with my own students to practice sight reading, because if you can't do that, you can't work with singers. Second of all, it's an incredible practice technique to have. And then how do you learn the styles of composers? It's hands-on. Boy did I learn about composers that I play to this day that a lot of pianists don't play, like Dussek or Turina or George Frederick Pinto. That's a great name right there.

{Jacob} - That is a great name.

{Sara} - Terrific composer, by the way. So, I would say I would relate that to my queer existence to the feeling of saying that I knew there was a huge world out there and I needed to explore it. I was seeking. I was seeking; I was trying to find something. I didn't even maybe even understand what it was I was trying to find. But in music I was trying to find something; in my personality I was trying to find something; and I was groping and grasping in many ways, having come from a darkly parochial background. But having said that, I would say thank God I had the mother that I had. She pretty much saved my life. My dad's a sweet man. He's still alive. My mother is not. And I feel for him now, during the pandemic. He lives in a nursing home in Baltimore. But I was very lucky. All right, I circled around. You asked me about repertoire, but I was trying to explain, in a sense, how it started from Mozart and kind of gravitated outwards, thanks to some influential people in my life.

{Jacob} - That was a beautiful answer. It's always interesting to me once I get to actually talk to people face-to-face, as best as this face-to-face is …

{Sara} - Zoom-to-face.

{Jacob} - Zoom-to-face. And as I am learning in this project in my own trajectory of what I'm doing, it's one thing to talk to somebody over email, and it's one thing to talk to somebody and hear their voice and hear what they're talking about and hear their actual stories. It is clear to me that you have a – it's such a terrible old phrase, but, a zest for life. I sense that there's a positive, excited light within you that  – and not to over-speak – we're just meeting of course – but I'm assuming, translates into much of how you live life. Is that fairly correct?

{Sara} - I think so. Yeah. I do feel so.

{Jacob} - Do you find that translates into your performance? Is that something you've thought about? I was listening to your Dvořák with the – I think it was the Victoria Symphony? 

{Sara} - That's correct. 

{Jacob} - And so there's an ability to sound full and rich and excited without ever sounding heavy and overburdened, and it just – it feels like a personality trait to me. As I'm talking to you now I feel the same thing. Is that something you've thought about, or is that completely out of your process?

{Sara} - No, I think about it, because there is this aspect of charisma. And from a very early age, I realized I had some kind of charisma. Two childhood episodes come to mind, both having to do with recitals. My teacher would have an end-of-year recital, and he taught at Towson State College, but he'd also taught privately on weekends, the private students. He mixed us all together. We had a solfege class once a week with everybody so I'd be doing solfege next to 28-year-olds and master's students. At the end of the year we'd have this recital, and my brother would have to play. He's two years older than me, and, you know, I think it demoralized him a lot, because I was six or seven and I'd play something really great, and my brother has zero charisma and no stage ability at all, and he'd just kind of crawl. He's not untalented as a musician: He has good ears and good instincts, but he just seems terrified of playing in public. So, I think I was about six or seven at one of those really early recitals, and I was playing a piece by Ibert; it's called "Le petit âne blanc," "The Little White Donkey." And it's got an opening page, sort of moderato thing. And then there's suddenly a big sforzando thing. It sort of takes off. And my mother was really nervous, and she took me aside and she said, "If you get lost, honey, don't worry about it. Just play; just keep playing. Whatever you do, keep playing." She told this to me so many times that it actually made me a little nervous, you know, because I hadn't thought about it before. 

So sure enough, I go on the stage and I play the opening page, and I couldn't remember, what is that big note – I suddenly forgot. And honestly, in less than a millisecond, my brain just said, "Doesn't matter. Note doesn't matter." You know. And I just went, bam! On whatever note it was. Then my hands found the next – bam! Da, da, da, da, da, da … And it just sort of took off, you know, whatever. Something said: The notes aren't important. It's the story. It's the music. A memorable and little bit scary memory I remember a couple of years later, I was probably about 10, and Reynaldo had given me a set of pieces by Villa-Lobos, which are a little hard to play called the "As três Marias," "The Three Marias." And the middle movement is a slow movement. It's very sweet; it's very nice. And I remember I was playing, and I was really into it, and it was very beautiful. I actually even started to tear – oh, it's so pretty. And I was the last performer before we had the little intermission. And so, you know, I finished playing and went backstage with parents. And someone, maybe my dad or my mom, took me by the hand and walked into the lobby area. And I expected, you know, that Mrs. Cornblatt would say hello or Mr. Schneider would come and tell me how good I played. They stared at me like I was a Martian, and they wouldn't talk to me. They were scared. Something had transmitted that was very moving, and they were freaked out about it, I mean, because I was a 10-year-old kid and I was playing something intense. 

I think, for the very first time, I remember having that sense of the dialogue between what's happening in my heart and in my brain onstage and how it goes out to the audience. This is now my profession of course. I've done it so many times now, and I have a very palpable sense of, when you walk down the stage, how to communicate: What is it you do with your body? How do you connect with people? Because, well beyond the music – under the music, beyond the music, behind the notes, is all of that emotion that the composer has put into it, and you're re-creating that. There's something very magical about music when it all works. I mean, there's plenty of times it doesn't work. Either I'm nervous on stage or something else is going on, or God knows, whatever. At its best, it's a deeply communicative.

I hope you concur with that. I don't even remember what your first question was about this, but you asked something about the zest for life. When I was a child, I could never have articulated that for you. It's just, I wanted to do that because it was fun. It was really important. It seemed important and it was fun and I wanted to do it. It's important to do it right, and it's important to share it and teach it and do it, you know. 

{Jacob} - I mean, I'm preaching to the converted, but I think it is, the further –

{Sara} - Okay. I hope so!

{Jacob} - The further I get in my own life, I think of it as more and more important - thinking about performance as political, and the more I get into being a queer body on stage in my own career, I think of every time any queer body steps on stage and plays any repertoire in any setting, it's an act of activism. It's political just because it exists and it's happening. I'm assuming that you have thought about this as well, because you have on your website a tab called "Transgender Issues."

{Sara} - Yeah, I wanted that to be on there. Some years ago – first time I really put a website together was probably around the year 2002, 2003. I wanted to put a couple of childhood pictures on there, and my manager told me not to. She said, "That's too upsetting. It puts it in people's faces that you were born as a boy." I was really upset about it, and I was mad at her, but then I thought, well, I'm not paying my manager not to do what she tells me. You know, I mean, I had that attitude towards dentists, accountants, people who do things that are – you know. If my dentist tells me, "We need to fill three cavities here," I'm not going to say, "Oh, let me have a look." She may actually have been dead right about that at that time. She's dead wrong about it now, and I had no problems. Actually, I don't put baby pictures, because I don't like baby pictures. That's kind of cloying and stupid. But everyone knows I'm trans, and I know I'm trans, and I think it's important to have some kind of statement. I wanted it for people who are not trans who, perhaps, are facing that who might have some fear of booking me or something like that to see, hey, this is what it is, and this is what it's about. 

You know. And in general, 99 percent of the time, I don't think from the concert stage I've ever really opened my mouth to talk about trans issues. In music I sometimes have. In terms of the encore, I'll play a piece of my own. I want people to know I am who I am. I'm certainly not ashamed of that. I'm very proud of who I am. The biggest decision I had to make in terms of that was transitioning, of course, and, when I did transition, was to play my first concerts as Sara and to face  the fear which was ugly. It was really terrible. Really bad. And to some extent continues to this day. I'm not naïve. I don't think that the world is really open to trans people. But I hope in the long run, this may force an awful lot of people to stop living in a plastic bubble. The United States is supposed to be a melting pot, not a collection of fiefdoms, you know! So anyway, I hope the statement still reads okay.

{Jacob} - It does. It actually – I copied and pasted it just because I liked the way you phrased it. The classical music business likes to pretend that it is gender- and color- blind regarding the concert stage, and that the high-minded pursuit of Mozartian Truth is all that is professionally considered in the evaluation of performing musicians. My own experience tells me otherwise. To that end I am happy to speak from the stage, with or without music, to help inspire our younger generations aspire to a fairer and more sincere artistic reality. Which I think is still spot on. I think we've been leading up to this for many years, obviously, but I think we are seeing so presently that there is just a vast difference in other people on stage, whether it's race or gender or sexuality. Do you see it changing actually? Do you see things moving?

{Sara} - I certainly see it – you know where I see it changing the most is at the university level with the students that I have, sometimes with younger conductors I work with, with younger people. Not only is it changing, it's – those people have zero issues with inclusivity, acceptance, understanding that it's a big melting pot, it's a big world out there, and so forth. I'm more concerned with the hierarchy of the classical music business. There's a lot of entrenchment in the upper levels of music. I think around 2012, I started to approach other managers in tandem with my own agent. We decided we would seek out larger management to assist us. One of them I went to, he was an older man, he's actually just retired, but at the time I went to see him around 2012, I remember going to see him at his office in New York. And before we started to talk about my needs in the music business, he asked me if I had worked with Tania Miller, who was then the conductor of the Victoria Symphony. I said, "Yes, I have, a lot." He said, "What do you think of her work?" I said, "It's terrific. One of the best conductors I know." And he said, "Really? You think so?" He said, "Because I don't think women can be conductors. They don't look right on the podium." And I regret, to this day, I didn't say what next almost came out of my mouth. I wanted to point to his calendar on the wall and say, "Oh, I've just noticed, you have an old calendar there. You need to replace that. It's about one century old." 

{Jacob} – I truly wish that story shocked me more than it does.

{Sara} - I could not even believe that could come out of his mouth. I thought, well, there's everything's wrong with the music business in a nutshell, of course. I went to a manager in San Francisco when I was playing with the Oakland Symphony, and I got a big write-up in the paper there. They put a nice story about me in the Chronicle, and I went to see this agent who was in San Francisco at that time. And he's a big, floppy, flamboyant gay guy. And we had a nice kind of meeting, and he says, "Well, I don't know why you came to see me. I have five pianists, and none of them is playing as much as you are." And I was thinking, I'm offering you 20 percent of this calendar but you're saying no? I said, "Well, I'm open – you heard my performance." He says, "Well, why did you wear what you wore?" I had worn a plain bright red top with black pants. I was playing Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety," which you have to jump around a lot, you know. I don't actually even like to wear pants, but for that piece I wear pants. This man says, "Why did you wear pants? I didn't buy a ticket to see someone who looks like the high school music teacher." And I said, "Well, what should I wear?" He says, "Well, of course, a big poofy gown. And do with your hair …" He says, "I mean, you've got to amp up the glam." I've had this problem with a few gay male friends – ex-friends, I should say – that I'm a drag queen. Their understanding of trans issues is, "Oh, this person's a drag queen, and they took it a little too far," or something like that.

{Jacob} – I mean, that mentality also doesn’t shock me sadly. 

{Sara} - I mean, this is really bad stuff. So, you know, I think you have to take the attitude that I certainly had as a younger person, that we can march into a glorious new era of inclusivity and understanding and get to a bright new era. You ain't going to get there. You're going to just – you're going to keep marching.

{Jacob} - I think there are encouraging signs, and it's always two steps forward, one step back. I've realized that this is how things work. It is extraordinarily frustrating to watch pendulum swings, and all we can ever hope for is that the other pendulum swing is coming. I think, from my small area that we occupy in the East Coast of Canada, it is starting to become more usual to see, and to have less and less of a conversation, which I think is very encouraging. 

{Sara} – I thought Halifax was a wonderful place, you know.

{Jacob} - Had you been here before? Was your concert here the first time?

{Sara} - I've been to Halifax three times, I think. I gave a recital there, and I think twice with the orchestra. I love it. It's a beautiful, beautiful city.

{Jacob} - It is a beautiful city. 

{Sara} – But orchestras are always going to have this debate. What is art, what is commerce and what is okay, what is not okay.

{Jacob} – It’s true. These institutions are so afraid of losing their bottom line. Or thinking they will lose money if they bring in someone “different.”

{Sara} - You know, when I went to Juilliard – this was around the time I really started to look hard at my gender and sexuality and I could not handle it, because I had no role models. None. I had some male gay friends, and I would sometimes hang around them, but I didn't fit in to their thinking about this and that.

Just before I got my first computer, I think I started to see some books about trans folk coming out, and then when I got the computer, there were chat rooms and information, and it started to really coalesce, and then I was able to transition. But before then I just couldn't. Around this time I saw a documentary called "Before Stonewall." Incredible collection of interviews of older, mostly gay men – I think some gay women as well, but mostly older gay men – who, in 1940s and '50s in New York, would meet in the so-called "Meatpacking District," because they literally would meet up just have sex in those refrigerated meat trucks, which must have been painful, uncomfortable. They all alluded to the fact that they felt they were the only people who had a kind of a same-sex attraction. They didn't even know there was a community, and they were terrified of the police beating them up – you know, rightfully so. 

It's the lack of information, connection, that keeps us in the closet. Young trans people hopefully, in major cities at least can have an image of who they can be. Role models. I certainly get plenty of emails, and I talk to groups. That's become a part of my artistic life. That's one reason I put the statement on the website. That's my way of saying, you want me to come and speak to your school, your college, your high school, you know, whatever, I'm happy to do that. This is not something I'm keeping under wraps. But, of course, around the world, you know, there are plenty of places where being trans is not okay – Hungary, apparently, now has decided that we don't exist. And it's so funny: I was going to go to Hungary in the fall, because I'm learning this huge piano cycle by a terrific Hungarian composer. So maybe it's meant to be. It'll be a big statement if I end up going and playing there. 

I don't know. If the virus allows me. So I guess I'm mostly responding to what you said about, you know, this very out gay guy made this career, and then yes, people can see: Oh yeah, I can do that. It's okay. I don't have to fit in with this norm and that norm. I can make my own norm. It'll take a long, long time, and the virus is a huge setback for everyone.

{Jacob} - Do you find people – like, young, queer pianists – come to you to study? Is that a thing that you've encountered?

{Sara} - I have, yes. I've had a couple of mostly younger gay guys have studied with me. Really only a few though. 

{Jacob} - Who else do you see doing work that is really out and proud and queer and onstage? Who else are people that you follow?

{Sara} - Wow, that's a that is a fantastic question. I don't think anyone has actually asked me. I've certainly been asked, you know, who are the younger pianists that you like, and I try to say I – you know, honestly, without trying to be a bullshitter, I would just say I like all of them, because I don't listen to any of them...

{Jacob} – Ha!

{Sara} - I listen to music out of my own hands all day long, and when it's not coming out of my hands, it's rolling around in my head, and when I'm not doing that, I'm giving lessons, and then I have to deal with young people who are playing. And so when it's time to do something else, I really don't listen to music. I take walks; I follow baseball when – if it'll ever start again; I go to restaurants. I don't know. I have a lot of other interests, so that's my way that – it's kind of a cop out to say I just don't hear a lot of younger people. But what I would say is that there are certainly pianists of my generation and older who I really admire, and the last of which I had close contact with was the Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda. I got to play for him in his 90s, and I was in my 50s then. Because I always wanted to know him and meet him and play for him. He was so gracious when I wrote to him. I said, "I'm sure I'll be the oldest pianist you've ever called a student." And he wrote back to me with the most beautiful lie. I can hear him in his beautiful Viennese. He said, "Dear Sara, you would never be my oldest student." You know I'm thinking anybody who can lie that easily has got to be a great musician. And he was.

{Jacob} – The best musicians are indeed extremely good lairs.

{Sara} - That's my way of answering your question to say that when I think of musicians that I want to listen to or pay attention to, there are people that I feel like I can learn from. And I don't mean to denigrate anyone. I've reached the exalted age of 60, where I feel like I have more teaching to do than learning now. That sounds like a crappy thing to say but I hope you understand what I mean.

{Jacob} - I do.

{Sara} - The focus is not absorbing anymore. The focus is honing my own message and learning to transmit what it is that I really most want to say. Though, recently I was at a bunch of queer music things. There was one that was in WQXR's series. They had a Pride concert. You can hear a lot of young musicians who are incredibly talented and have a lot to offer, and certainly they are out and proud. There's a group in New York that I'm hoping to do a lot of work with called ChamberQUEER. It's basically a string quartet made up of genderqueer young people. I do pay attention to young pianists, and from time to time, especially when I have to judge competitions, I'll hear talented young pianists. And I'm very proud that I've mentored a couple of really terrific young composers, one named Michael Brown and another named Jared Miller, who wrote me a piano concerto. You should be in touch with Jared. 

{Jacob} – Well, I certainly will. And if I come across any fantastic queer pianists who are electrified by Mozart and need a queer role model, I will happily put you in touch.