Sara Davis Buechner's "Of Pigs and Pianos"
Diving into the depths of her history and present-day beliefs, 1981 American Pianists Awards winner Sara Davis Buechner spoke with Lee Clifford about the unique blend of life and art in her autobiographical show, "Of Pigs and Pianos." Noted for her brilliant technical skill and evocative performances, Sara’s program brings to the stage a 75-minute condensation of her life's narrative, filled with music and acting, but notably absent of singing or tap dancing! Reflecting on the essence of the program, she notes, “Maybe the message of the show is Shakespearean: It's to thine own self, be true. And I guess hoping that audiences are made of so many different kinds of people that they'll see something of their own story, and that's something that resonates and perhaps inspires them or gives them belief in themselves."
An edited transcript follows:
SARA
Hi, Lee.
LEE
Hi! Thanks so much for joining.
SARA
Sure. Always a pleasure to see you.
LEE
Yes, it is. So, I'm excited you're going to be on our season again. And this time performing your show, “Of Pigs and Pianos.”
SARA
Yes, the theater show that is sort of the story of my life in a condensed 75 minutes with music and acting. I don't tap dance, but I do act. And, no singing either!
There's one very dramatic scene where I climb on top of the piano. That's my favorite part of the thing.
LEE
Wow!
SARA
I get to imitate all of my various therapists that I've had over the years, which is sweet revenge. So that's what you have for it.
LEE
Fantastic! When we spoke before, we spoke about the origins of the project, and I will share clips from our previous conversation. But, I want to talk a little bit more about the repertoire this time.
I'd just like to start about the first piece because, it is new to me: Peter Wolf's “Adagio.”
SARA
Yes, Peter Wolf is the cousin of my very first piano teacher, whose name was Veronica Wolf at the time when I began my piano lessons is now Veronica Colon. And she's an experimental, electronic composer, and she's also a dean at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.
Now, but she was a 18 year old piano student when she came to our house in our neighborhood to give piano lessons. And, I've always had a very, very sweet rapport with her. A lifelong bond. Then shortly before Covid, her cousin Peter--who I did not know but because she had given him my contact info--out of the blue sent me some recordings of these pieces that had recently been played in Hungary. It was a set of 24 sort of jazz inspired preludes that he written and were published by Universal.
I was immediately struck with them, and they resonated deep in my heart. They're very beautiful pieces. The slow works are quite moving, and the fast ones are lively and really engrossing and infused with that lively Hungarian spirit of my first teacher, and so I immediately started learning some of them.
The piece begins with this Adagio as a kind of tribute to my first piano teacher and sort of saying, well, here's the source of where all this stuff has come from.
LEE
That's wonderful. Tell us a little bit about your composition, “Cancion Para Dos Niñas.”
SARA
Yes, this is a piece I wrote, in my I guess it was my late 20s, early 30s. It's a little bit vague to me now, but I was living in the Bronx. I was living in a not very nice apartment—not a very great neighborhood either. It was a difficult time in my life, and I was just beginning gender transition.
My upstairs neighbor was a single Dominican mom, and she had to two little girls. Various gentleman callers would visit, usually at the handy hour of about two or three in the morning, and she had no rug. And what would happen is the men will come over and then the kids would wake up and they would start running back and forth, you know, as only children can do, and wake me up. I had insomnia for months and months and months.
I literally, at first I would take the broom handle and hit the ceiling! But, I thought, okay, now if everything in life truly is an opportunity, what's this an opportunity for? I thought about the two kids who when I saw them outside of the apartment were cute and adorable little girls, you know? And I thought I had this fantasy where instead of acting like a savage, like, if they woke up sweet little things I would lullaby them to sleep with a nice little Dominican style lullaby.
So I wrote this piece called “Cancion para Dos Niñas” (song for two little girls) and it actually has two cross rhythms. It starts with one rhythm, then morphs into the other, as if it's a two, and then sort of put them together. That's the idea of the piece.
And it's a beautiful little piece. I'm very proud of it, but the only thing is, you know, it never put them to sleep. Its practical purpose was lost. But the music lives on, you know, and I'm sleeping better now, too. So everything's all right
LEE
Fantastic. So we should note that in addition to all these contemporary composers, you also play music of Mozart, Haydn and Chopin. And you're telling your story. Right? And so, each between pieces, you get up and tell stories from your past. So it seems like you're kind of time traveling every time you either stand up or sit down on the bench because you're going to a different century of music or a different era of your life.
How do you do that? Time travel? How do you immerse yourself in that current moment?
SARA
Well, you know, it's kind of interesting. I mean, in essence, any time you play a piano recital you're sort of doing that, I mean, assuming it's not an all one composer program, you're playing a lot of different pieces of music, right?
Different people from different centuries in different countries. And it's sort of like world traveling and time traveling, and I'm used to doing that. When I worked up the show, it was very much the inspiration of Bonnie Barrett of Yamaha and a director named Philip Baldwin and a director that he'd worked with named Sal Trapani.
Both Sal and Philip, you know, coming from a theater world, inspired me so much. They trained me to what does an actor do in the course of something like that. And for me, the hardest part was memorizing the dialog. When I first brought this thing to them, I said, well, I have a general idea of what to talk about and what to do. And I said, I'm used to talking to audiences. I can wing it.
They said, no, you have to write a script. It was so painful to write that all down. And then to literally memorize it, because I'm used to being impromptu, certainly in music.
I mean, you've memorized it, you're playing same notes, but it's never the same performance. But I had never really done that with, with words. And as we got into the serious rehearsals shortly before the first performances of the thing, it was a couple of times I just choked up and I cried and, you know, because it was it was like going to the therapist's office and revisiting these key moments of my life that were very traumatic in some ways for me.
Growing up as a transgender kid in an era when that word didn't exist and things like that were just buried—you didn't talk about it, you hid it, that was closeted, etc. Then coming forth in the late 1990s how did that affect my life and so forth. So this is the arc of the story that's told. And now having finally sort of comfortable with the memorization of the dialog, it feels like a very through composed piano recital for me. I don't think about, oh, this is hard now, what do I think about next, etc. it's finally, I can, execute it, one after another.
But admittedly, for the audience, of course, I think it's supposed to be kind of this wild movie with all these scenes with them. When it's all over, it's like, wow, what I just saw. I mean, you know, we all know we go to the movies, we see people's lives portrayed like that.
LEE
So what message do you want the audience to take away from this this show?
SARA
Well, that's the toughest question you've asked me so far! You know, because I mean, I feel like I should answer that. Well, audience was right, you know, to make them say yes. Right? Yes. No. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm not sure it's really a message, per se.
I mean, it's my story of coming to grips with who I am, with the reality of who I am. And in some sense, maybe that's a cautionary message, because certainly along the way, I could look around and see people who I thought were would never really get there. You know, we've all met people who are closeted.
I don't mean literally closeted, but just people who, there's sort of a shell to them. And, for whatever reason, to be self-protective. They don't reveal a lot of who they are to people. And as a musician, I don't have that luxury. I always felt like whenever I'm playing the piano, I'm giving my truthful self, and I didn't want a life of not giving that.
I thought that wasn't fair to myself. It wasn't fair to anybody. So, I mean, maybe the message of the show is Shakespearean. It's to thine own self, be true. and I guess hoping that audiences are made of so many different kinds of people that they'll see something of their own story, and that's something that resonates and perhaps inspires them or gives them belief in themselves. Or, I think it's a hopeful show. I mean, it's got a lot of stories, some of which are pretty frustrating and upsetting, but it ends on a very upbeat note of hope and hoping that we're getting to a better generation and a better world than the one that I had to cope with when I was young.
LEE
And hopefully accepting other people's truths.
SARA
Yes, I believe so. Acceptance is the key.
LEE
Yes. Thank you so much.
SARA
That's fantastic. Oh thank you, thank you.
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Sara Davis Buechner's "Of Pigs and Pianos".....