They sit there, the music is moving over and through them, at the same time
they're looking at the landscape and hopefully feeling and experiencing it in a new way.
In a Landscape is a traveling outdoor music show
where we bring a nine-foot Steinway on a flatbed trailer that transforms into
a stage to incredible places, mostly in Oregon.
We set the piano up, and give the audience wireless headphones,
so that the music becomes a soundtrack to their experience of each landscape.
One third of our audience has never before experienced live classical music, one-third!
That's huge in the classical music industry.
Why are they hearing it? It's because we're
bringing the piano out to Lake County and Wheeler County and Harney County.
We're coming out here to Shore Acres State Park, where people can wear their
sweatpants and their jeans,
and feel like they're just part of the family.
It is physically more challenging to bring a nine-foot Steinway
as opposed to a keyboard or a smaller piano, but one of the things that was really important to me
was to have the same piano that's in all of the great halls around the world.
Jordan Schnitzer purchased this 1912 Steinway for the project.
We devised a system where the legs come off, it rides on its belly.
We have a piano technician that works on it
for anywhere from two to five hours before every single show.
It's this incredible machine and we are challenging it,
but in doing so we're sharing it with people that would otherwise never have
the opportunity to see it, let alone get close to it and lie under it and touch it.
As people are sitting around the piano, they can either listen acoustically of course,
but we also put microphones in the piano and then a radio signal is beamed out to the headphones
and people can sit with those headphones and have the concert quality
sound in their ear while they're lounging back in their favorite chair, you know,
maybe having a picnic, looking out at the waves here of the Pacific,
and creating a whole experience.
I try to encourage people throughout, time and time again, throughout the show to get up
and wander through the landscape.
Every show is totally different.
Sometimes I feel like I'm working kind of in spite of the weather,
in spite of the conditions, and I have to try even harder to like
communicate because my hands are cold or it's windy and I can't hear it quite as well.
And there's either something beautiful in that and challenging,
and then in other landscapes, it's as if the landscape is just giving me a big hug.
To prepare for a show here, where it's a little cooler, I'm gonna go stick some
hand warmers all over my arms, tape them up, do some stretching, take a few breaths, walk around.
You know, in a concert hall you're separate from the audience.
You're in a different space, and here it feels so not precious,
like there's not this 'I'm on the stage and you ,the people, are out there.'
It feels very neighborly.
Oregon is so incredibly dynamic, to be
on the coast and then the next day on the top of a mountain and then in the high desert.
We have so many ecosystems. It's been six years and there are always new places, new people, new
landscapes and things to explore, and learn about here.