Arts

Four Hands in Harmony

When pianist Martin David Jones and Clara Park first met, it was love at first sight. But it was 10 years before they decided to get married.

by Jim Garvey

That scamp Mozart made playing piano four-hands all the more fun by writing parts that cross over-where one player's right hand has to reach over the other player's left hand. He composed that way to enjoy little illicit thrills as he taught his pretty female students, his fingers brushing theirs. But Mozart or no, the art of piano four-hand is a most intimate bonding of body, mind, senses and souls for pianists.

"Solo piano is a lonely existence," says Clara. "I love musical experiences that are collaborative. Playing with Martin-this is gonna sound very cheesy-but it's the most rewarding collaborative experience for me. It's great to have someone to play with all the time, just a built-in ensemble partner. I don't realize how good we are at meeting each other until I play with another pianist who is not him. Then I think, 'Oh there are a lot of things we don't know about each other, because I haven't played with this person before.'"

In fact, Martin Jones and Clara Park, both piano soloists who play with effortless elegance and extraordinary technique, have turned being good at "meeting each other" into their life's work, and Augusta is all the richer for it.

They met at the Peabody Conservatory in 1988. He was from Los Angeles, she from Athens, Ga. They had the same teachers at Peabody, they admired each other's playing, but their tastes were different.

"When we first met I was really into German classical," Clara says. "Martin liked what we called 'high calorie' 20th-century music." "You know, early 20th-century composers-Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin," Martin explains. "Her stuff is Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven." "Then we started influencing each other," she says.

"Now both of us have a pretty strong interest in 20th-century music in general," he adds.

"We kind of met in the middle."

Not right away, though. He completed his doctorate at Peabody and went off to teach. She headed up to New Haven and got her doctorate at Yale. The wonderful thing was that they were both pianists. That was the terrible thing too.

"That's the reason it took 10 years to decide to get married. I used to tell people, 'Everything is right about Martin except, darn it, he's a pianist.' And that's not supposed to happen. Because, realistically, how could we make a life, what city will support us both?"

Well, it sure wasn't LaCrosse, Wis., the first place they tried together. Martin was teaching at Viterbo College there. LaCrosse didn't need another piano performer or teacher. The couple moved to Augusta in 1998 when Martin joined the fine arts department at Augusta State University. Clara has been working in the department as an adjunct, has a successful private studio and finds plenty of opportunities to concertize, both with her husband and alone. And their four-year-old daughter, Maya, keeps both of them busy.

Martin has developed a reputation as not only a superb pianist, but also a fine teacher of music and humanities. But he also appreciates the department's expectation that he'll spread his musical wings beyond the piano and classroom.

"If you go to a larger, more prestigious music school, they're going to want you to specialize and, at this point, I'm enjoying not specializing, but teaching a diversity of courses. The music theory that I do teach directly influences my composing and the opportunity to direct the Greater Augusta Youth Orchestra helps me as a conductor. My main focus here is piano, but still I get to do a lot of different things and I like that. And I think it's the same for Clara."

"It is," she says. "And I think music has come to a point where you shouldn't specialize as much. It's all about being able to adapt, to combine jazz and world music and classical; it's all about being able to put things together."

Martin and Clara could move on to larger metropolitan centers, but they are quite content in Augusta. "For a city this size we were immediately impressed," Martin says. "The symphony is very good; there's a fine resident opera company; the choral society does good stuff; the churches have excellent music programs. Plus there's lots to do here pianistically and we weren't redundant to what is already going on."

Clara nods. "New York is great, but do they need another piano teacher? For us it's been great to start a family here. It's a community that's growing. ASU is growing and it's exciting to be part of that growth. Music school and the life of an artist is just so full of angst; it's very nice to be in a place where you can feel that everything you've learned is coming together and you can contribute to your community and have opportunities you wouldn't have in a saturated place." Clara and Martin are sitting next to the Steinway concert grand on the empty stage of the Maxwell Performing Arts Theatre at Augusta State. They're on a short break from the ASU Conservatory Piano Camp, which Clara is running this summer. In about 10 minutes the 21 campers will come running in for Martin's demonstration of jazz improvisation. Martin ran the camp the first two summers he was in Augusta. "I couldn't get it going," he admits. "She's really making it work."

They compare their musical gifts and limitations.

"I'm not nearly as talented as Martin in this way: He has the very unusual ability to play literally anything exactly by ear upon one hearing. He's particularly good at TV tunes."

Martin laughs, a little embarrassed. "It's become a parlor game."

"To try to stump Martin," Clara explains. "You name an obscure show and he has to play the theme. But the thing people discover is how much TV he watches."

As long as we're into confessions, Martin offers another. While living around Baltimore as a student at Peabody, and then in his first teaching job, he was a pretty active cocktail lounge pianist. "I played every hotel in the Inner Harbor at least once. I used to want to hide it but now consider it a good thing. And here during Masters, if there's cocktail work, I'll do it."

Clara's skills are different. "She might be too modest to mention this, but in terms of interpretive gifts, she surpasses me. She plays with more soul and more artistic depth. Every time I play a concert, I play it for her first and she makes me better."

She parries the compliment by returning one. "As a musician, Martin is much more than a pianist-he also does composing and conducting. He's been commissioned to be composer for the Georgia Music Teachers Association meeting next year."

Martin winces. "November. North Georgia College, I think. I guess I'd better write a piece for that."

Which brings us to a discussion of another composer-conductor-pianist, Andre Previn. Along with Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten, he's one of Martin's heroes, a musician who does it all. Martin has just recorded a Centaur CD, Piano Music of Andre Previn. "I found out he had written a CD's worth of piano music, much of it unknown."

"Previn's music has a lot of jazz in it," Clara explains, "and sophisticated virtuosity in the classical sense as well. So I think Martin is a very good person to play it because he studied jazz as well as classical, not to mention the cocktail stuff. He's versatile and he can capture the meaning."

Martin opens the score. "My favorite piece is The Invisible Drummer. It's a suite of five intentionally jazzy pieces he wrote for Vladimir Ashkenazi. You're supposed to imagine a drummer behind you keeping you in exact strict time, so the push and pull has to fit around metronomic rhythm. The third piece is very much in the jazz tradition: You have the tune, which they would call 'the head,' and you improvise over it and you bring the tune back at the end. It's all written out so it's not true improvisation, but it sounds like pretty heavy improvisation."

He plays a sweet melody in a melancholy minor key, then the first variation, like raindrops over it, then the build-up in subsequent variations until in the last, a furious storm of thunder with runs and clusters, it dies out, and the sweet, sad, simple melody returns. It's dissonant jazz, tonally based, moving to listen to, amazing to watch.

And speaking of storms, the 21 piano campers, first through 11th graders, have roared into the theater and are swirling all around the piano. Clara and the camp's other faculty members, Jason Maynard and Alyssa Burnette, get the kids settled. Yesterday Clara and Martin played four-hand piano for them. Today Martin will teach them about jazz.

He plays "Happy Birthday to You," melody on top, chords on the bottom. Then he takes away the melody and plays just the chords. "Now I'll make up something new against those chords, a different melody never played before. It's improvised. That means I'm making it up right now." It sounds nice, but it's not really jazz yet. "Now I'll make those chords spicier, like when you're cooking and add peppers and spices. So far I've played triads, chords based on thirds. Now I'll make the chords longer by adding sevenths and ninths." He plays his new tune with those new chords. Eyes get wide. Suddenly, "Happy Birthday" has become very cool.

He teaches them blues scales and plays bass while each of them in turn improvises above him. Nick, one of the campers, is shy and tentative at first, but soon he's cooking. After he finishes he says, "When you're making up a tune like that, it's like no one else is here." Martin gives him a high five.

Next season Clara and Martin will be playing several concerts, some together, some as soloists and some as soloists in a shared concert. "We're trying to do all the Beethoven piano sonatas," says Clara.

"He wrote 32 of them and you can do them all quicker if you're married to a pianist," Martin confides. "You only have to learn half of them."

He and Clara will also play a two-piano concerto by Bach with Martin conducting the youth orchestra from the keyboard. And on November 12, Martin will be soloist with the Augusta Symphony playing Ravel's G-Major Piano Concerto. They will probably play other concerts as well. "We make up our schedule as we go along," Clara says. "We get excited about a piece, an opportunity presents itself, we have a deadline and we do it."

Back home, whenever they get the chance, they'll sit side-by-side on the bench and play four-hand piano for the fun and discipline and intimacy of it, leading and following, matching tone and tempo, fingers flying, crossing over onto each other's octaves.

Somewhere Mozart is smiling.