Tiffany Poon, Pianist: A Rising Star on Her New Album “Diaries: Schumann”
Tiffany Poon. Photo by Remi Holwick
Are you looking for a safe space to ask the big questions: who am I? Who do I want to become? Or do you simply want to daydream without being judged? Look no further: Hong-Kong born, New York-based pianist Tiffany Poon is about to launch her solo album Diaries: Schumann with Pentatone, offering her listeners an inspiring soundscape to do all of this. Her album reflects her unique outlook on life and classical music: after attending Juilliard’s Pre-College division for eight years, Tiffany enrolled at the Columbia University/Juilliard exchange program, graduating with a degree in philosophy. Tiffany has also been on a mission to use social media to bring more people into the world of classical music. Today, she has over 323,000 subscribers on YouTube and runs “Together with Classical,” a charity that supports music students around the world. TWoA talked to Tiffany about her first mini-toy keyboard, life and, of course, Schumann.
The Power of Toys
TWoA: Before we talk about Schumann and his Kinderszenen, let’s briefly go back to your own childhood. How did you get interested in the piano and what role has your family been playing in your musical journey? [Tiffany quickly runs off to grab a small, bright yellow toy consisting of four keyboard keys.]
Tiffany: Have you seen this? This is how I started. My mom bought it for me because it was colourful. I talked to her this morning because I wanted to know what really got me into piano. This is how it started [Tiffany presses the four keys]. I was obsessed with this for a while, for a really long time. Every day, I would try to match the tone with the pitch to the sounds that I heard on my dad’s CD player. It’s just a chord, so there are always missing notes in between. My dad then took me to a lot of record stores to just explore music, not to make me become a musician but just to show me the world of music. My dad also brought me to music stores to try out pianos. Apparently, I had a lot of fun, and I was very good at faking that I knew what I was doing. I hadn’t had any lessons, I just played on his thing, and I watched, I guess, DVDs of people playing the piano. I knew how to sit and “play,” but I wasn’t actually playing anything. I was just faking it and people thought I knew how to play. I was four, I guess. My parents thought: “OK, maybe she does really like to play the piano.” They then looked for lessons in the supermarkets, there were listings, it’s very old school, paper posters. I had some lessons for two months or something. My parents thought I should have a piano to practice on when I’m not with the teacher. I took lessons three times a week for half an hour, and I was pretty patient for a kid, so they thought I could probably get interested into the piano further. So that’s how I got into the piano and having a piano.
“This is how I started.” Screen shot, interview with Tiffany Poon.
Why Schumann?
TWoA: “Diaries” is your debut solo album as an adult. Why did you choose Schumann?
Tiffany: Because I’m a little crazy! Growing up, I had a lot of “dual things.” I played the piano, but I was a normal kid - but I wasn’t normal, because I played the piano and I had music stuff to do that other normal kids aren’t doing. When I was in school, my friends would ask: “So how fast can you play?” and I would go like this on their arm [races her fingers up her arm] and they would say: “Wow! Cool!” It was this awkward thing that I felt growing up: I was an adult type of person who hung out with teachers and liked classical music while my peers were into pop culture and didn’t really understand me. But I was their age. And then there was the language element because I came from Hong Kong and at the time, I was still learning English. People would say: “What’s up?” and I would look up to the sky. There was a lot of inner, dual conflict that was happening.
I think when I started exploring Schumann’s music, I think it’s very unique for a composer to have multiple personalities all in one piece of music. His Kinderszenen could be a whole pop album on its own. It’s so diverse in the mood swings and broad spectrum of thoughts and emotions. That’s why I gravitated towards Schumann. I can imagine myself dancing – no, I don’t dance. But I can imagine myself as a character at a nineteenth century ball or doing something else that I’m not really doing in my normal life. It’s very imaginative.
TWoA: Do you remember your introduction to Kinderszenen?
Tiffany: I don’t remember, honestly. But I’m sure Träumerei was in one of those classical music for kids CD compilations. I definitely grew up with Horowitz’s Moscow DVD and I think he played Träumerei there. And also Horowitz’s CD with the other pieces of Kinderszenen. I think Horowitz brought me into Schumann’s Kinderszenen first. I don’t know if I officially played it until I was an adult, actually. I think I tried out Träumerei, but I don’t know whether I played the first piece until I was maybe 22, 21. So, actually, I was an adult by the time I got into the whole set. I dabbled in it. The last movement, I have some funky markings that I definitely wrote when I was a kid. I didn’t really go into the whole set until I was much older.
I actually don’t remember when I got back into Kinderszenen as an adult. At some point, I decided to use the first movement, the name is “Of Foreign Lands and People.” I was making videos about my life as a pianist on YouTube and I always put background music with whatever I was playing, and I thought: “This is such a good theme music for whenever I’m travelling.” I did that for a while, and I kept putting it in the beginning of my videos on YouTube. It kind of became a theme music.
Daydreams
TWoA: Some of the publicity material for your album mentions “daydreams.” What is the meaning of daydreaming for you, and do you think that classical music can inspire daydreaming?
Tiffany: I remember, it was during the pandemic when I was exploring all of Schumann’s stuff and reading his books. There are these two volumes, this is one of the volumes [holds it up to the camera]: “Music and Musicians” by Schumann. A lot of people don’t know that he was a music critic. He wrote about a lot of things. He had this secret society called “The League of David.” His Davidsbündlertänze is named after this group of composers and musicians who reviewed other people’s music under pseudonyms. Schumann was Eusebius and Florestan and also sometimes Raro – there were three characters he was in charge of. His wife Clara had a different name, also.
When I was exploring his music, I was daydreaming a lot, just thinking a lot about music in general. I was thinking on my couch, thinking about the future of music: if we’ve already forgotten so many composers that I was discovering through Schumann’s journal, what will happen to Schumann a hundred years from now? Will people forget about him the way a lot of people forgot about those composers that Schumann loved and his fellows really admired? I was daydreaming a lot, and I was also thinking: daydreaming has a bad connotation in English. You are in class, you are caught daydreaming. And the response is: “How dare you! You’ve got to focus, you’ve got to concentrate!” I feel there isn’t really a space where you are encouraged to daydream, in a positive way. It’s usually: you are wasting time daydreaming, you are not being productive.
But thinking about the album, thinking about music actually came out of a lot of sitting at home with my books and listening to a lot of music I was discovering through the journals and just letting my mind drift off and think about different ideas. That was the role of daydreaming. Then I was thinking about the story line for my album because I wanted it to be a holistic concept. It wasn’t just “three random pieces that I chose.” I wanted something that had a story and a message behind it. It's my first album in ages. My last one was when I was a teenager. I was fifteen or sixteen when I recorded it, so this album is kind of the official one where I would say it’s me today, Tiffany. I wanted to describe this process of becoming who I am as a person. A lot of people, I hope, can be inspired to think outside the box, because I think we are so busy in our normal day to day. It’s a very routine based life that we live. There are so many videos about routines: “going to bed routine,” “get ready with me routine,” “make-up routine,” “practice routine” – there is always a routine. That is why I wanted to encourage to have a piece of music that kind of represented that in-between state of daydreaming or something outside your normal selves with Schumann’s Arabesque and then going with his Davidsbündlertänze. That was more inspired by the philosophical aspect of my education because I studied philosophy in college and it’s the reason that I came up with the stuff that I do on YouTube. I like that Schumann had a philosophical side to him. That was the future side of me, starting from the childhood side of me. That’s the concept of the whole album.
Being Human
TWoA: You also have a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia in philosophy. What impact has studying philosophy had on you as a musician? What’s the key philosophical question that’s driving you, in the album, and as a musician?
Tiffany: When I was writing the liner notes, it boiled down to three questions that I had, which I didn’t really think of so succinctly when I was doing the album: who are we? What do we stand for? What do we want to become? I think that was the existential side of the album concept, just some questions that are broad but very human. I think that’s the whole catalyst for why I started doing the YouTube videos and sharing my life: to share the human side. It wasn’t necessarily to show me – it looks like it, and it is about me, but it is also just – I don’t have to be a particular person, I could be anybody. Nowadays of course many people do show the behind the scenes and it's very much the trend now, but six, seven years ago when I started, that was very novel: just trying to bring back the human side of classical music so that kids don’t think of it as old, dead music and think of it more as a contemporary thing that still exists today, because it’s played by people like yourselves.
Schumann’s Values
TWoA: You said Schumann also had a philosophical edge. What was the main philosophical question that was puzzling, driving him?
Tiffany: He had this thing he called “the fight against philistines,” which basically meant snobbish people who pretended they knew what good art was and what good music was. He wanted a progressive side to music. He was writing good reviews about Chopin, for example, or Berlioz, at a time when a lot of people didn’t recognize his talent or his compositions yet. That’s what I appreciate. He was thinking about: what is good music? You can say he was anti-Liszt and anti-sensationalism, but I think it is a little bit more nuanced than that. But if you think of TikTok: I’m not a fan, I’m not on it. There is so much noise, flashy things, clickbaits. To make a good video on TikTok or Instagram, there’s a written recommendation on Instagram that you have to capture the audience’s attention in the first three seconds. I think there isn’t really that time to slow down and think or just appreciate something. You don’t have to think, you can just feel something for a little bit longer than three seconds or ten seconds. It’s sad.
I like Schumann’s theory on aesthetics in that sense. He had certain guidelines that he would think about when he was judging a piece of music. He really loved “fresh” music – I was making a caption about how I landed on the cover of Amazon “Fresh Classical Playlist” and I was thinking: that’s perfect for Schumann, because he would write “fresh,” or “lebhaft” (lively) in his music. He wouldn’t even write traditional tempo markings like andante and allegro, that’s very, very rare for Schumann. He would write very life-like descriptions. “Lebhaft” (lively) appears maybe ten times in his music, for Davidsbündler maybe even. It’s so unique. He really thinks of music as a lively, fresh thing. He would complain about music that is too repetitive and stale and doesn’t inspire a lot of imagination. These are the values that he stood for that I liked.
Taking Time for Yourself
TWoA: You talk about daydreaming, about being able to take time. What sort of emotional space are you trying to create for your listener in the album?
Tiffany: Honestly – whatever they want! I think there is almost a track for everyone because they are all so different. There are different moments of life that you can think and feel with one of the movements of Schumann. It’s quite simple – there are thirty-something tracks. There is one for each life story, life moment that you have. I like that about Schumann, it’s very diverse. It’s that diversity that makes Schumann’s music special.
TWoA: What were the pros and cons of studying philosophy on top of your music – that must have been very challenging?
Tiffany: It WASN’T difficult, because I was wearing horse-blinds and I didn’t really know it, until I looked back and thought: I should have gone out more. What was I doing! But that mode made it not so hard for me. Actually, it felt a little bit easier, weirdly, because when I was in middle school and high school, I went to normal school five days a week, Monday through Friday, and Saturday, I went to Juilliard for Pre-College. It felt like I had school six days a week, plus Sunday for homework. That was eight years of my life. And then: college! Only five days of school, sometimes even only four because sometimes I didn’t have classes on Friday, or I only had a discussion class. So, I went from a one-day weekend for eight years of my life to a three-day weekend. That was magical. I actually felt like I had more time. I had some people saying: you won’t have time to practice if you go to Columbia instead of studying at Juilliard full-time.
The trade-off of what I ended up doing, as much as I love the four years at Columbia studying philosophy – don’t quiz me on music history! I will not know a lot of things that people who were in the music curriculum might have been trained to know. But I think I’m ok so far. Of course, more knowledge is always encouraged, and I’d love to know more, I definitely missed out on a lot of the basics – actually, I don’t know. But I feel I would fail a music history exam or potentially music theory stuff. But I did music theory and ear training for eight years at the pre-College.
TWoA: What advice would you give to your younger (teenage) self?
Tiffany: Be yourself. Is that cliché? When I was fourteen, still, even now, I still have to not compare myself, even though now I’m not surrounded by people every day. It’s not the same pressure as when you go to school eight or six hours a day. Back then, I always had this pressure at the back of my mind: “I’ve got to join in and do whatever the other kids are doing.” The pressure you feel to be part of a clique or a friend group. There is all this drama. It’s this mentality that’s so human, in a way, starting as a baby that wants to get attention. You always want to be included. But if you want to do something cool, sometimes you’ve got to just follow your own weird thoughts and ideas. I would say: be yourself. Or maybe: don’t be afraid to be yourself.
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