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"Aha!" you say. "Now this is what I was hoping to find!"
I didn't feel it would be fair to present a website without addressing some of the most popular and most unusual questions I've been asked lately.
To pose a question yourself, please write it on a piece of paper - include your name and hometown (and age, if you don't mind) - and hand it to me after a concert. Other queries will be drawn from interviews, with the permission of the journalist.
I hope you'll find this feature informative.
I found your website to be the most "public" accessible of any musician I have ever seen. Can you tell me why it is so important to you to have this kind of contact with your fans, such as the postcards, the student essays, all the personal information and the fan art? What made you decide to highlight, in particular, the fan art? Do you think it helps people feel closer to classical music?
- asked by Anonymous, in China
The website grew out of my different experiences as a musician and audience member. As you may know, I always stay around after my concerts to meet the audience, no matter how late it might get. (I only leave if I have to catch a plane.) The postcards are an offshoot of an actual paper postcard project I did with a third grade class when I was fifteen or so; posting my entries online just makes them available to everybody. And I enjoy writing, so the journal is a good outlet for that form of creativity. The student essays came from an encounter with a different group of students. The personal factoids comprise all of the information I'm comfortable sharing with the public – it's not terribly personal stuff, just things that I've been asked, that I thought people might be interested to know, and that I've often wondered about my colleagues. As for the fan art, I was compiling quite a collection of artistic presents, especially from my younger audience members, and I wanted to share the drawings with everyone who visits the site.
The content on my site might help people feel closer to classical music, but I compile it also because I like to interact with an audience on a longer-term basis. I hope that listeners will keep returning to the site to stay up to date, and that that way, we will get to know each other better over time: I meet them face to face in the lobbies of concert halls, and they can read more from and about me online, whenever they want. I see a lot of people grow up. I meet kids who then come back to other concerts of mine when they're teenagers, and then they return with new spouses, and then they bring their babies. Art is a cycle of life.
It's important to me that my site be a resource for concertgoers and young musicians; the only way one can find out what it's like to be a touring performer is from someone who does it, and those people are usually very hard to reach. This is my little addition to the worldwide pool of information.
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