Stephanie Trick; CSG 2013.

[From Bill Powers (2012.10.03.0830 MDT)]

I have heard her and talked with
her personally. She is from St Louis. Her dad is retired from tech
support at Principia HS in St Louis. She gave a concert at our local
Ethical Society last year. She is endearing, but that jazz she puts out
is mean. I think I also remember her doing some great stride work.

Glad to share another common uncommon love.

Yes, some great, even incredibly great, stride work. She has said herself
that it’s “demanding” and requires a lot of endurance and
precision. It’s quite unusual for her to hit more than one or two wrong
notes (that I could hear) during a piece. From a PCT standpoint stride
piano involves the left hand alternating between hitting a note in the
bass and then, still with the left hand, a chord in the middle range, at
the rate of perhaps two or three complete cycles per second and a
distance that is often 18 inches to two feet, with an accuracy of plus or
minus a quarter to half an inch, and doing all this for 3 to 6 minutes.
The bass notes follow a walking pattern much like what you hear played on
a string bass in a jazz band and the chords change accordingly. All this
goes on while the right hand is executing intricate fast figures in the
treble clef. In the interview I mentioned, she said that while she was
taking lessons, age 5 to 18, she practiced an hour a day. Now she
practices eight hours a day. I can readily believe that this is the level
of effort required to maintain all those control systems working so
well.
Interestingly, in telling others how to do this, her advice is
“relax.” I take that to mean that even trying to play that way
would would be impossible for anyone with significant conflicts.
I connect with her so strongly because in high school friends called me
the Boogie Woogie King. I learned a lot of pieces by listening to
recordings of Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Earl “Father” Hines,
Meade “Lux” Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson, and many
others – the same artists that Stephanie Trick learned boogie woogie
from in the same way. You can find samples on YouTube by googling on the
names. When she plays boogie it is totally authentic, and about a dozen
levels of skill above anything I ever achieved, though there are
occasional spots where she sounds the way I did back in the day. I was a
great success in the early '40s, for the sole reason that no real
musician in the school was interested in playing boogie woogie. Now, as I
said to my sister Alice, I have learned what real humility feels
like. Painful, but at the same time a great joy.

Stride piano is much harder than boogie woogie. In boogie woogie, the
left hand simply plays a repeating eighth-note pattern, shifting from (in
my case) the key of C to F to G in a standard pattern, whle the right
hand plays various riffs. I used to practice the left-hand patterns for
hours to make them automatic, while reading a book. Some
musician.

Best,

Bill P.

P.S. Lloyd (and everyone else), if there is to be a CSG meeting in 2013,
someone else is going to have to organize it. I’m kind of flat about it
since encountering massive indifference at CU, and my COPD, as predicted,
is not getting better. On oxygen 24-7. The main symptom is simply running
out of breath after any physical effort like walking 50 feet – otherwise
everything seems quite normal, even my thinking (although that may be a
matter of opinion). You might contact Fred Good and Mike Mermel, or
anyone else who seems interested. It would be nice to spend a week much
nearer to sea level at some place that can be reached by train from
Denver.

Mary, our original organizer, will have been gone for eight years next
week, on October 8th at 3:30 PM MST. Spare her a thought.

BP

···

At 04:50 PM 10/2/2012 -0500, lloydk@klinedinst.com wrote:

[FromMike Acree (2012.10.03.2212 PDT)]

Bill Powers (2012.10.03.0830 MDT)–

Thanks, Bill. I enjoyed these, too, and also found Stephanie endearing. Her advice about relaxing seems wise. And challenging, given the energy it takes to do what she does.

Here’s a short video of another impressive pianist of about the same age, playing a piece which also has some jumps in the left hand:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWvEKWbK80Q

Mike

[From Bill Powers (2012.10.04.1000 M<DT)]

Mike Acree (2012.10.03.2212 PDT) –

MA: Thanks, Bill. I
enjoyed these, too, and also found Stephanie endearing. Her advice
about relaxing seems wise. And challenging, given the energy it
takes to do what she does.

Here’s a short video of another impressive pianist of about the same age,
playing a piece which also has some jumps in the left hand:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWvEKWbK80Q

WOW. Denis Matsuev is not quite endearing but is most impressive. Much
faster than Stephanie Trick can go! It’s interesting though – did you
notice an error in a G-flat at about 2:44?

Neither did I. Neither could anyone, including the artist. At this speed
there is no conscious control simply because a control system at some
level may detect an error, but before the error can be corrected
consciously, the next note is happening. Most errors never rise to the
level where consciousness is working. You have to review memory even to
know that there was an error.

So how the heck can anyone play with high (but not perfect) precision at
this speed? I have puzzled over this since encountering Stephanie. In her
stride playing, her left hand moves a foot or so down the keyboard,
descends to press a (correct) black or white key, then moves back up the
keyboard while the fingers reconfigure to play a three or four note chord
and descend to produce it on a combination of black and white keys. The
two moves occupy a total of perhaps a third of a second when she’s going
fast. Obviously none of that can be conscious.

But at some level there are control systems working and they are working
accurately. I think I may have figured it out. It may be related to the
way I got my boogie left hand to be automatic way back in high school by
practicing for hours while reading a book.

What is needed is not a reference signal for moving the hand, but one
that defines the end-point of a movement in terms of proprioceptive
sensations, up to at least the relationship (keyboard to hand) level.
During practice, the lower-order perceptual signals at the moment of
contact are recorded for both positions, bass note and chord. This would
include arm position and finger configuration – half a dozen or more
control systems would be involved. This very nicely takes care of
nonlinearities, and there is an opportunity to tweak the memories every
time an element of the sequence occurs. It takes a lot of practice to
record all the target perceptions and keep them up to date.

Once the correct end-point perceptions have been recorded at a slow
speed, higher-order systems can now come into play. The left hand goes
(about two octaves apart at each transition) C - chord - E - chord - F -
chord - F# - chord - G - chord - F - chord - E - chord - D - chord and
then repeats the pattern. One control system is setting the target bass
positions, several others are setting the finger (chord) position
reference signals, and one is moving the arm back and forth between the
approximate positions at the ends of the stride.

If the player is a mere normal human being, we may consider that about
half a second is needed to create a -note-chord pair. This means that the
sequence control systems need to change the reference signals for
relationships only every 500 milliseconds. That is certainly a more
believable number than what we would come up with by looking at the
lower-order variables like finger configuration, note pitch, or force
intensity. Once you start thinking this way, you can listen to Stephanie
and pick out the slow patterns that are superimposed on the fastest
movements. You can hear the C,E F,F#,G,F,E,D bass line as if just one
person were using one finger to create that sequence, with plenty of time
to do it (and hear it). Stephanie actually remarks, in one commentary,
that the style is demanding because “the left hand is doing the work
of two people.” She being a classically-trained pianist, you can
also hear her tastefully adjusting the dynamics (loudnesses) of the notes
and varying their timings around some average repetition rate, and you
can see her eyes moving to check the calibration of the lower systems.
Those things also happen at a much slower speed than the hand and finger
movements. The eyes generally move just before a large jump or complex
chord is about to happen. Neuroscientists think she is
“predicting” where the hand will go – we know that she is
picking the perceptions that will be matched to the recorded reference
signals and making sure the kinesthetic perceptions correspond correctly
to the more precise visual perceptions. Of course an observer could use
the reference signal (if observable) to predict what the perceptual
signal is going to be, but that’s not how the control system
works.

One of the comments on the YouTube page for Denis Matsuev was
interesting: “This boy plays like a pig.” Actually I thought
so, too, at times, but attributed that impression to the fact that I just
couldn’t listen fast enough to tell whether the jumbled sound was
actually an orderly progression at a high speed. There are a lot of nasty
comments on YouTube, a few even about Stephanie Trick, but I always
assume they are just crude people who think they know everything. But
maybe the “pig” remark came from someone who can hear faster
than I can, or even than Denis Matsuev can. I can hear pretty fast, but
the Matsuev performance exceeded my speed limit and it often seemed
rather cacophonous, which in Greek means shitty-sounding. All this
relates to Rick Marken’s experiment with speed effects at different
levels of perception.

The nice thing about PCT is that you never have any trouble finding
examples of control behavior – everything a person does is an example.
In fact, sometimes I get interested in what a particular behavior
illustrates about the theory and forget to notice the meaning or
significance of the behavior in other terms. Look how the forehead
muscles draw the skin up into wrinkles, and how the knee bends as the
foot is raised and then thrust down to contact the floor again. Oh,
sorry, do you mean you’re angry with me?

So I should mention that Stephanie plays the piano in a way that melts me
down into a puddle of love and admiration, and I suspect that the line of
people who react the same way to her would extend well over the
horizon.

Best,

Bill P.

P.S. Lloyd Klinedinst, you say you have met and talked with Stephanie
Trick. How about copying this post to her, or her family, with an
explanation?

will do gladly and let you know the consequences
Lloyd

P.S. Lloyd Klinedinst, you say you have met and talked with Stephanie Trick. How about copying this post to her, or her family, with an explanation?

Dr. Lloyd Klinedinst
10 Dover Lane
Villa Ridge, MO 63089-2001
HomeVoice: (636) 451-3232

Lloyd Mobile: (314)-609-5571
email: lloydk@klinedinst.com

website: http://www.klinedinst.com

···

On Oct 4, 2012, at 12:55 PM, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Rick Marken (2012.10.05.1300)]

Bill Powers (2012.10.04.1000 M<DT)--

BP: WOW. Denis Matsuev is not quite endearing but is most impressive. Much
faster than Stephanie Trick can go! It's interesting though -- did you
notice an error in a G-flat at about 2:44?...

... I can hear
pretty fast, but the Matsuev performance exceeded my speed limit and it
often seemed rather cacophonous, which in Greek means shitty-sounding. All
this relates to Rick Marken's experiment with speed effects at different
levels of perception.

Yes, I showed that the speed limits can be on the perceptual side when
there is minimum speed limits on the output side. The point, of
course, is that we can only control what we can perceive. If you can't
perceive it then you can't control it. This is work I did with Warren
Mansell and his student, Zahra Khatib, so they should get equal
billing. Now if someone would just publish it then maybe a few more
people would realize that behavior is the control of perception (not
output).

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com