Piano & Feldenkrais
Alan Fraser was born in Montreal in 1955 and there pursued his musical development, which centered around the piano but including composition, cello, classical singing and forays into pop music. His first two serious teachers, Alan Belkin and Lauretta Milkman had both studied with Phil Cohen, a pioneer in the field of musico-physico linkage in piano technique, and Alan spent several years under Cohen himself after his lengthy apprenticeship. After conceiving the goal of developing a new approach to playing and teaching piano that would grow out of the Feldenkrais Method, he embarked on a professional training in the Method in 1988. Feldenkrais Method applies advances in the field of bio-mechanics to ameliorate neuro-musculo-skeletal functioning – in short, it improves how we move by improving the very learning processes involved in movement.
Move to Yugoslavia
He moved to former Yugoslavia in 1990, beginning a collaboration with the acclaimed virtuoso Kemal Gekich. The goal: to synthesize elements of the three main 19th century schools of piano playing (the Russian French and Germanic) with more recently developed principles of human movement found in Feldenkrais Method, to arrive at a new school of piano playing. A decade after he set out for Yugoslavia, Alan Fraser’s unusual odyssey continued in mainland China, where in the millennium year 1999-2000 he worked with the most promising pianistic talents at Wuhan Conservatory of Music. By now his application of Feldenkrais’ principles of movement to the brilliant practical work of Gekich and others was crystallizing into a whole new vision of piano technique. Back in Yugoslavia, Alan Fraser finally distilled the fruit of this rich cross-cultural pianistic and pedagogical experience into book form. The Craft of Piano Playing, presenting both a general theory and its practical application in over 60 exercises, was published by Scarecrow Press in 2003.
Recent Activities
Recent activities include presentations at the special ISSTIP course on Musicians and Health at the London School of Music and Media, Thames Valley University; an annual series Feldenkrais for Pianists and other Instrumentalists given at Accord Mobile, Paris, the premier center for Feldenkrais Training in Europe; a two week intensive workshop in Awareness Through Movement and Piano at the Vertiskos Summer Music Academy in Greece; master classes in London (King's College), Lewes and Cambridge, England, in Trossingen, Dortmund, Cologne and Hamm, Germany, as well as appearances throughout the rest of Europe and North America. he has also given master classes in Nizhny-Novgorod, Russia, the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, the Conservatoire Superieure Nationale de la Musique in Paris, and McGill University in Montreal.
Appearances & Recordings
Alan Fraser has appeared as guest artist at many music festivals including the Scotia Festival of Music in Halifax, Canada, the Wilde Festival of Music in Bracknell, England, the Festival International de Musique in Saintes, France, the Budva International Summer Festival in Montenegro, the Belgrade Summer Music Festival and the Yugoslav Composers’ Symposium. He has broadcast solo recitals and concerto performances on the Yugoslav National Television network and has made numerous recordings for both Yugoslav radio and Radio Canada. The playing on his CD Russian Recital has been acclaimed as “Horowitzian”. Alan Fraser has had prizewinning appearances at the International Composer’s Tribune in Belgrade and the Ibla Grand Prize Competition in Ragusa, Italy, and has given the world premiere of the Trifunovitch Piano Concerto with the Radio Television Belgrade Symphony Orchestra. He has appeared several times at the International Liszt Festival in Hamilton, Ontario. He also has considerable experience as vocal soloist, including ten years with le Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montreal. His compositions include works for piano, several solo songs, a liturgical mass and Magnificat for 8-voice unaccompanied choir and a Missa Brevis for organ and choir.
Students' Activities
He has prepared students
for many important international competitions – the Chopin in Warsaw
1995 and 2000, the Liszt
in Budapest 1996 and 2001, and the
Tchaikowsky
in
Moscow 1994 and 1998. He has coached Ratimir Martinovich who won
2nd prize in the Joplin
(Missouri) in 1994, and 1st prize in the
F.L.A.M.E.
Competition
in Paris 1997. Of his students in Wuhan,
Xu Hong
aged 16 placed
among the finalists at the Hamamatsu 2000 and won 1st prize at the
Hong
Kong 2000 and 3rd prize at the Gina Bachauer
2001, while Tao
Chi, also 16, won 4th prize at the
Hong Kong 2000.
Alan Fraser on staff
at the Art Academy of the University of Novi Sad, now Serbia & Montenegro,
where he teaches both piano and Feldenkrais Method.
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