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Pianist Son Yeol-eum sight-reads from a digital score saved on her iPad during a concert at the Kumho Art Hall on Dec. 22.
/ Courtesy of Kumho Asiana Cultural Foundation |
 By Do Je-hae
Asian piano sensations Son Yeol-eum and Lang Lang have something in common — they both chose the iPad as a performing partner.
For the first time for a Korean pianist, Son stepped on to the stage without a page-turner for an encore during a recent concert. Instead, she played by sight-reading from a score on her iPad.
During a concert at the Kumho Art Hall, the 25-year-old played Liszt’s arrangement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, tapping the screen of the iPad with her left index finger to turn the pages on her own.
Soloists usually perform from memory, but when playing encores, they sometimes appear with page turners and scores.
But in this case, Son appeared with neither, except for an iPad which she held close to her heart when bowing to the audience after the electronically-aided performance.
 The 2nd prize winner of the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition is an avid user of the iPad in practice as well.
Professional classical pianists are required to memorize huge volumes of scores and carrying them around can be a burden. That’s when the iPad comes in.
Digital scores are particularly useful during practice when a performer must master a variety of pieces within a limited time.
To download free scores, students and professional musicians frequently visit the website of the International Music Score Library Project at http://www.imslp.org, one of the most popular web portals for classical music digital scores.
On this website, one can browse by composer, instrument, genre and recording. Over 150,000 scores and 6,500 recordings for over 47,000 works by over 6,700 composers have been uploaded.
Son not only keeps digital scores on her iPad, she also uses an app called “Fourscores” that serves as a metronome to keep time during her practices.
For concert pianists, another way to utilize the iPad on stage is to play it like a piano through various apps available from several app developers like SMULE based in California.
While Son was the first pianist to bring an iPad onto the stage here, Chinese pianist Lang Lang was the first to do so in the U.S. back in 2010.
For an encore, the former child prodigy played the “Flight of the Bumblebee” at lightning speed on the iPad instead of the Steinway Grand piano he used during a performance with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
The most amusing aspect with these apps is that anyone can attempt to play the piano, because one simly has to tap the screen using their fingers and the selected music will play.
“Anyone can be a Lang Lang with (such apps),” said British piano virtuoso Stephen Hough on the iPad piano during a YouTube interview.” “It’s fun. This is the sort of thing that, for 15 minutes, I’ll have fun trying to see what I could play.
Along with instrumentalists, conductors are also beginning to perform with iPads.
A New York Times article featured pianist-conductor Jeffrey Kahane’s latest performance with the New York Philharmonic, where he conducted a Mozart piece from a harpsichord with an iPad in front of him.
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데이트부터 청소부터… 시급남편까지
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