[Audio]

Wayne Potter:
You have a website, and you’re using that as your primary tool for the sale of the CD, or are there other ways?

Simon Bielman:
There are other ways. I’m still getting my feet wet in a lot of this. I just now finally have the CD, and I’m just now finally putting on concerts and finally getting out there. The question is how. I have a Facebook fan page that I’ve just started advertising, and so far there are about 126, I think, fans on there. There are billions of people in the world, I just need to get that number higher. Now, the part of this plan is: how do I market it? How do I treat this like it’s a business? Because that’s what it is. That’s how I pay taxes. It’s just, my product is music. It doesn’t mean I’m all about the money, and I’m not writing anything with that in mind. I have no plans of selling-out, but, at the same time, how do I do what I want to do, reach the people I want to reach, and make a living doing that? Because this is a very full-time job. I’m practicing six hours a day, and then I’m writing music, and then I’m maintaining a website, and marketing. I don’t see where my full-time job at Kinko’s fits in.

Potter:
It’s sort of an aside now, it sounds like. Perhaps you could let the audience out there know, in some very specific terms, how they could get to your site.

Bielman:
It’s pretty simple, it’s SimonBielman.com.

Potter:
You’ll need to spell that.

Bielman:
(Spells it. Describes the site, which is irrelevant since you’re looking at it right now.)

Potter:
Now, you have done at least one concert that I’m aware of, and you asked for donations. You didn’t charge for the tickets?

Bielman:
Yeah, because this is all about people and communication… Well, I have personal feelings about music where I got involved with it for free, and I taught myself, and the music I grabbed was from the library, or samples on the internet, or CDs that a friend has that I just borrowed and listened to. Always, in the back of my mind was: if I didn’t have that opportunity, where would I be? So, it’s something I feel like I can’t really charge for, although I know I need to. I ran on a donation model just because I wanted to see [if] people really care enough that they’re willing to donate. Those who can’t donate, I still want them to hear this. I also want to get more subscribers to the website, and, at the same time, I just want people to hear it. I want poor college students to be able to go see a concert and be inspired, or someone on the street to just come in and see a concert. It’s because music changed my life and I think, well, maybe I can give that back in that way. And, sure enough, I think I [requested] about a $15 donation and, on average, [I recieved] about $10 per person and that works just fine by me, so that’s how I’m going to do it.

Potter:
If people want to learn more about a potential schedule, an actual schedule, they could go to your website, and is there anything in particular that they look for once they get there?

Bielman:
(Describes the events calendar, etc.) I kinda waiting until I come up with a very solid, sure-fire gameplan before I just really go out there. You know, I want to do it right when I finally go and do it.

Potter:
You don’t want to use a shotgun, you want to use a single bullet that goes straight for it. (Laugh)

Bielman:
Right. (Laugh) I’ll operate with a scalpel instead of a hacksaw.

Potter:
That’s a good idea. Now, one of the things I didn’t ask you earlier… Perhaps we could spend some time listening to one of the pieces that are based on another composer. Is there one particular piece that you think is good for that?

Bielman:
Yeah, the first track on the CD I made, Iconoclassic is the title, which is odd because classical music usually doesn’t have titles, and I kind of didn’t even want to have a title, but I… Yeah, it’s a complicated story. Anyway, the first three tracks are a sonata that I wrote that is very classical. It’s intentionally so because I just wanted to write like Mozart for a little while because it just sounded fun, so I did it. The first movement of that… there’s a lot of Mozart, Scarlatti, Bach, a little bit a Beethoven, maybe even a little Schubert. There’s a lot of different things, and it’s been described a lot of different ways. The second movement is essentially a Mozart knock-off. There’s even a piano sonata theme in there that’s pretty similar [to another Mozart sonata]. The third movement is Beethoven all the way. That was [really] looking over the classics, that piece.

Potter:
Long ago, his name was Joseph Campbell, talked about passion and it’s place in being a driving force in your life, and it sounds like you definitely have a lot of passionate for this, and not only do you have passion, but you play wonderfully, and it would be great if you had more opportunities to express yourself and portray your music and things of that nature. I would certainly urge my audience to consider it and take a look at Simon’s website, or be in touch with Wayne Potter to talk about it a little more. So, thank you, Simon, for coming and talking about this wonderful experience in your life.

Bielman:
Thank you. It’s been great.

[Audio]

Wayne Potter:
Society needs leaders who will help society set its own goals and objectives. Where would we be if some wonderful scientist or technitian hadn’t discovered how to build better batteries for our new electric cars and our iPads? Photo will take cells that generate electricty. Someone has to have an idea that leads him or her solve some issue or situation. I’m sitting with Simon Bielman. I would describe him as a professional pianist. He may have more to say about that than I do. I would like to have you describe yourself in terms of that particular component of your life. Who are you? How would you describe yourself?

Simon Bielman:
I’d describe myself as that. I’d describe myself as a young professional pianist and composer. That is about it, whatever that means. I’m a performer on stage, in the studio, I write, and I try to get my music out there.

Potter:
Now, in any way have you considered yourself a pioneer making new efforts, or finding new ways to do particular things?

Bielman:
I do nowadays because playing classical music and being in the situation that I am — I mean, I’m not a Juilliard graduate, and I’m mostly freelance — but there’s not much of an infrastructure to build a career off of that, so I’m having to build all of this from the ground up and come up with strategies to reach people without a network, put on concerts entirely myself, learn the pieces myself, write without guidance, operate as a small business, and build infrastructure from the ground up.

Potter:
It sounds like a lot of work.

Bielman:
It’s a lot of work.

Potter:
What do you want to achieve? What kind of values, what kind of statements do you want to make to the general population through your music?

Bielman:
I want to prove to people that the sort of music I love to play, which is classical music like Bach, Ravel, and Shostakovich, leaning towards more 20th century composers, but not avant-garde post-modern… I want to get the message out there that it’s okay to listen to this stuff and, although we’re not culturally used to it, if you give it a chance you’ll find that there’s some real content there. That’s what got me hooked; it wasn’t really a teacher or a class. Nobody handed me this music, I just was exploring different kinds of music and happened to stumble upon Shostakovich symphonies and found that the more I listen to one particular piece, the more layers of depth I would uncover. It was addictive. From there, it developed into a lifelong passion. The message I want to get out is that everyone can have that.

Potter:
Okay, so you’d like to find ways to sort of help everybody uncover the complexities and the depth and the meaning of that kind of music?

Bielman:
I want to do that and I want to take the sort of things that… I mean, I consider myself a creative person. There’s a creative part of me, and I just have to create things. I want to take that kind of music, and expand on it. Where the genre is today, it seems like it falls into these camps of very post-modern or new age. They have a very isolated audience when, traditionally, I don’t think that music was that. I think it was meant for people. That’s who I’ve always wanted to play for, and that’s what I’ve decided I’m going to write.

Potter:
Now, your path to get to this point didn’t necessarily start with but included an opportunity to study music. Could you describe what you did in that process and how you were motivated by that to do this kind of this?

Bielman:
Well, it was in high school. I didn’t start playing until I was fifteen. My brother played viola in youth symphonies when I was younger, and those sounds got into my ear, but I kind of disregarded it. When I started getting back into music, I did remember a bit of that. That’s why I started with Shostakovich, because my brother was always listening to that, so I decided, “Oh, I’ll just go and dig that up.” Then I found out that I really liked it. I was going through some troubling times in high school, and I found that as I taught myself to play the piano and I really dove into this kind of music, it found some solace for me where I was and helped my own soul. That kind of passion for the music that grew in me was very healing and therapeutic, and, at the same time, it’s a very “unifying mind, body, and soul” sort of thing. There’s so much music that I’ll never run out new music, I’ll never run out of ideas, I’ll never run out of new things to do. I just want to be in this world and surround myself with this and do this because I know that, if I do, until the day I retire or die I’ll always be satisfied. That’s the message that I want to get out there. To me, it’s not culture, it’s a way of life, and it’s a very rewarding way of life.

Potter:
So you started being self-taught, it sounds like, right?

Bielman:
Yeah.

Potter:
Eventually, did you move into a formal educational program where you learned additional kinds of things and music?

Bielman:
Well, in high school, I wasn’t doing so well in my classes, not because I was dumb, but because I wasn’t very motivated. I was originally doing computer programming in my spare time, and that kind of pushed homework aside. That went away largely and was replaced by music, and, at one point, I just decided that I was tired of going through miserable high school life. I just started playing the piano a lot and started not going to class and [started] playing the piano instead. Dropping out of school is bad, but I was able to get a scholarship to study piano at Western Oregon, which was the first time I officially had lessons. That was when I was 17, so I was actually in college a year early. From there, I was, for the most part, self-taught, but entering college is when I really started to learn. Six years later, here I am.

Potter:
Now, you indicated that Shostakovich sort of speaks to you, and I guess I would ask if you could broaden that. Are there any, if you will, heroes in the musical world that speak to you? Obviously, Shostakovich isn’t with us anymore. Are there any contemporary people, or are they all long-gone?

Bielman:
I struggle to find contemporary heroes, and I don’t know why. There are just certain composers that speak to me, but there are just certain ones that don’t. A lot of them happen to be contemporary, and I really don’t know why. I’m always looking for more new composers and new ideas to explore, but at some point… I think Shostakovich lived until 1975 or so, and I don’t know if Bartok died later or earlier, but he also speaks to me. He’s more contemporary [1841-1945]. I don’t know, it seems like music falls into categories of “isms” these days. There’s minimalism, and serialism, those are sort of current, and ecclecticism… I want to write a C Major chord and have that be fine. I don’t want to have some doctrine decide what I like and what I don’t like. I like what I like, I want to write in that style, and that’s about it.

Potter:
So, can you give the audience a little bit of an explanation about what some of these “isms” are, a little bit more meaning? You know, depth?

Bielman:
I don’t really have anything against them because I do like good ideas, it’s just that I’m mostly not drawn to them. The big one is serialism. It’s the idea that there are twelve notes per octave, and you come up with this 12×12 matrix of tones before you write your piece. The idea is that you order those twelve tones into a row so that you don’t repeat the same note twice and that’s your material. You can get some really interesting sounds with that, but I have sounds in my ear that I’d like to bring out, and [serialism] kind of pushes that aside and says, “No, there are rules as to what notes you have to use,” then you adjust your ears to whatever comes out. That’s a sort of a backwards way that music is supposed to work. It comes from within you… It’s a form of communication, and I don’t know what that communicates. You do get some interesting sounds, and it’s interesting theoretically. I’ve written some things like that that I really enjoy, but sometimes I want to write a major chord and be fine with that. Minimalism is getting a lot from a little. It’s a lot of textures. Phillip Glass is what I think of. I’m not really an expert on a lot of contemporary music because I’m not especially drawn to study a lot of it, but that seems to pretty much be the two camps.

Potter:
Okay, well, you pretty much identified the track you’re on. The style, the type of music that you feel is very important. Can you ever feel yourself merging, sort of an ecclectic approach? You say you don’t study popular music, that you really study the classical side and that must generate some ideas in yourself about how to write something else. Is that accurate?

Bielman:
Well, I do play a lot of jazz, but I’m not super-big into jazz like most jazz musicians are. They will play that and nothing but that and live through that, and I get it, but I’m not drawn to it that so much so I don’t call myself a jazz musician these days. But, I do play a bit and I want to incorporate that kind of stuff into music because I like exotic rhythms, and chords, and really interesting stuff like that. It’s “contemporary classical music,” which is kind of an oxymoron, that I’m not drawn to. I like a lot of different things, and I don’t want to stick to one style just to be stubborn and say, “No, I have to write in this style, because that’s the way it’s written!” If it works, I’m going to write it. If I’m writing something that sounds like Mozart for some reason and I throw in jazz rhythms and, all of the sudden, it sounds like Leonard Bernstein or something, I don’t see a problem with that. If I want to hear it, fine.

Potter:
So now, you’re not just a piano player, you’re a composer. You’ve indicated, to some degree, how you go about composing, at least how you figure out all the different strands and how they come together. Can you give an example of how you’ve composed one of your pieces?

Bielman:
The latest thing that I wrote was an exercise for myself because I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I’d like because I’ve been beating my head over a wall trying to figure out how to actually make this work as a career. It’s hard to justify spending every hour of every day writing a piece of music when no one’s going to hear it, and no one else is going to learn it, and I could have been looking for a job instead. The last piece that I wrote was to say, “Okay, I’m going to get back into this, one way or another.” It ended up being a set of 24 pieces, one in each major and minor key. I set a timer for a half an hour and said, okay, I’m going to write every day, I’m going to write one little piece a day, and not stress about it. I just need to write fast, I need to write well, and develop that skill. So, I’d set this timer for a half an hour, and I’d sit at my coffee table with a blank sheet of music and a pencil. Most of the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write except for the key I was going to be in. So, I just set a timer and then just started writing to see what happens. Sometimes, I’d plan, like, okay, I should write some kind of waltz or something because I haven’t written a waltz, or I’ll do a bluesy thing because I don’t have a bluesy thing. I ended up with about 22 solid minutes of music, and they were all written without the aid of a piano. I would go write them, run to the piano, see what worked and what didn’t, and make a few corrections, [but] for the most part, I didn’t have to. That was about it. After they were written, they still weren’t done. When I am at the piano and I need to learn to play them, there’s so much more that needs to be put into the music that’s not written. I think it’s like that with anything. If you just take the page, and you just play it literally, then it’s not quite music yet. You have to take all the ideas and see how they work and how they relate, add some expression, add personality, because there’s no personality on the page. That ended up being pretty well-recieved, so I think that’s how I write now.

Potter:
Well, let’s take this opportunity to hear one of the pieces you composed.

Bielman:
The first in this set is kind of a quirky, “quasi-classical but with wrong notes” kind of thing. I just started writing this, you know, a Mozart little thing, but then, as I was writing it, I’d say, “Ah, whatever I’m just going to put this note here even though it’s wrong,” and, “I’m going to put a trill here that doesn’t make any sense, but it’ll be funny.” Each of these pieces, the [whole] piece is called 24 Sketches… Each of them is around a minute long because I only had a half-hour to write them. And they range anywhere from about 25 seconds or so to another that is a minute, twenty [seconds].