FANCY FOOTWORK

The art of painless page-turns explained by Hugh Sung

It all began with a lost encore.

Several years ago, I was checking into a hotel in St Louis, where I was going to be playing a recital with the violinist Aaron Rosand, who specialised in playing obscure romantic gems as encores. As I rifled through the stacks of music in my bag in the hotel lobby, I discovered to my dismay that one of these precious gems was missing. What to do? As Aaron’s teeth ground his cigar and the proverbial steam jets billowed from his ears, I begged the front desk clerk to use his fax machine. I called my newlywed wife, still learning how to drive, and asked her to find the part, drive to the local office supply store and fax it over. When she asked, ‘What’s a fax machine?’ I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Little did I realise how badly I underestimated that thought. It turned out that on the way to the store, she got lost on the highway, had to pull over onto the shoulder and call my father for help.

When the fax finally came through, several hours later, my wife sobbed into the phone, ‘Never, ever, make me do anything like that again!!’ I realised that something drastic needed to be done about the problem of paper.

As a collaborative pianist, I was well versed in the two sides of the coin that plague our craft: parts and page turns. When playing for the entrance auditions at the Curtis Institute of Music, I had an annual ritual at the school library, hunting down parts and having to carry several boxes of them in order to accompany the applicants. As for page turns, the problem really speaks for itself; any busy pianist will have a full repertoire of page-turning horror stories, from well-meaning seniors with bad bifocals, to the accordion part made of photocopied music and tape that suddenly dictates a big polka in the middle of that pianissimo section. Surely there had to be a better way – particularly with the emerging power of portable computers.

In 2001, Microsoft introduced its Tablet PC. For the first time, a laptop screen could be rotated so that you could place the computer on its side and view an entire page of music in its native shape. Not only that, there was a pen that could actually draw digital ink right onto the screen. I splashed out on a Toshiba model in 2002 and scanned a digital picture copy of my beloved ‘Emperor’ concerto. When I saw how clearly the notes were preserved on the screen, and how easy it was to draw (and erase) digital ink markings in full color, I was sold. Now, instead of carrying boxes of music, I could have my entire library in the hard drive of my computer wherever I went. No more lost or misplaced parts. And I could still annotate them with my own fingerings and markings, as easily as with pencil on paper.

I then thought how nifty it would be if I could come up with a way to turn pages by foot instead of by hand. I went about hunting for pedals that could be programmed to trigger a simple page-turn key command. Although there were already a number of such pedals on the market at the time, they all shared the following drawbacks: 1) they clicked audibly when pressed (hardly the best thing in a pianissimo passage); 2) they had long, unwieldy cables to connect them to the computer (unfurling cables on stage doesn’t, of course, make for the most elegant stage presentation); and 3) they required some intricate programming to set the key command correctly to turn the pages. My new dream was to find a silent, wireless, plug-and-play page turning-pedal that could work easily with any computer.

By 2007, my Tablet PC had completely replaced my paper library, storing over 6,000 scores in its hard drive. I was using a homemade page turning-pedal that was heavy, clunky and wired, but at least had the benefit of being silent. After accompanying one of the student recitals at Curtis, a wild-eyed woman almost bowled me over, peppering me with questions about my digital music reading system. Her name was So Young Lee, at that time the director of an arts center in Boulder, Colorado, and she insisted that I get in touch with her friend Lester Karplus, an engineer and entrepreneur who had simultaneously been dreaming about just my kind of system. After a year of discussions, we decided to go into business together to design and build a page turner for musicians that solved all three of my hangups, being silent, wireless, and plug-and-play easy to use with virtually any computer. Much head-banging and brain-wringing ensued, and we finally came up with a name for my dream page turner: the AirTurn.

Since launching AirTurn in December 2008, we’ve entered into partnership with the developer of MusicReader, a program enabling people to read music comfortably on a PC or Mac laptop. MusicReader features enhanced page-view and turning capabilities, as well as the ability to order pages for repeats and create playlists. MusicReader also enables users to draw annotations on their music, and works, as well, as a sophisticated catalogue system, enabling you to find that obscure encore instantly with just a few clicks. Hundreds of musicians now use the AirTurn system, including the violinist Ray Chen, who won the 2009 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium using his AirTurn for the required contemporary work.

When technology removes physical fetters, it’s amazingly liberating to experience the enhanced flow of musical creativity, artistic freedom, and pedagogical effectiveness, both in playing and in teaching. And, of course, my wife is now forever freed from late night encore fax runs!

(The above article originally appeared in the December 2009/January 2010 Issue of Piano Magazine.  ©2010 Rhinegold Publishing. Posted with permission from Rhinegold Publishing.  www.rhinegold.co.uk)