Insights: an interview with pianist and composer Edward Enman
Every piece of music is an insight into the composer’s world. Canadian pianist and composer Edward Enman’s latest release for solo piano, Insights, offers snapshots of moments and emotions—feelings that are both personal to him and applicable to all of us. From nostalgia to agitation, confidence to questions, this album is a journey through the joys and fears that make us human.
Enman is a gifted composer and an expressive pianist. Combining multiple compositional and performance techniques and a mixture of through-composed elements and improvisation gives these pieces an immediacy and freshness that allows the listener to experience their own emotions through Enman’s notes.
Enman reached out to me a year ago when he released his ECMA and Nova Scotia Music Awards-nominated Breathe In, Breathe Out, which was recorded with cellist India Gailey and fellow pianist David Potvin. I was impressed with the music on that album and encouraged him to contact me again if he ever released a solo piano album. I’m so glad he did. It’s a joy to feature Enman, his words, and his music on No Dead Guys.
At what age did you begin music lessons, and when did you start composing your own pieces?
My older brother took piano lessons, and I showed a keen interest when I was four years old. The teacher made an exception taking on a student that young because I think I was a quiet, attentive kid, who had an obvious desire to play.
I began making up pieces at the piano when I was ten years old, and then began writing them down a couple of years later. In high school I began writing choral music and more complex piano music, even while losing interest in playing the piano (soccer, hockey, choir, and friends were more interesting to me for a time).
So, the innate desire to create has always been there, it just transformed over the years.
What composers have had the most influence on your compositions and why?
In terms of raw emotional energy, Rachmaninoff and Beethoven have affected me the deepest. Debussy has been a huge influence in colour and sound worlds, and then John Adams and Canadian composer Ann Southam have had deep impacts on my music from multiple angles.
Recently I’ve been allowing other influences to shine through in my music. I was a kid who grew up infatuated by the Beatles, and my whole adult life has been to the soundtrack of Icelandic band Sigur Rós. If you take all these artists and throw in a hundred more, we can start to paint the picture of my style.
I came from classical training, but always had an interest in a wide array of musical styles. I’ve recently been trying to sink into this combination a bit more in my own music. For sure the minimalist composers of the last 50 years have had a profound impact on my composing, and I think that is clearly evident when listening to my music.
In addition to your work as a composer and a concert pianist, you are also the author of the blog, The Running Pianist. What inspired you to start this blog and what has the been response to it?
I ran a lot as a kid and rediscovered it in a big way within the last ten years. Long distance is what I love and I’m almost always training for something (right now that’s the 2023 Chicago Marathon). While working through marathon training cycles I began to recognize many similarities between musical training and athletic training: planning, consistency, physical demands, emotional and mental demands, performance anxiety, even perception of time, among many other topics. I had so many ideas that I began writing them down and thought others might want to read them, hence the creation of The Running Pianist blog.
Recently I haven’t kept up with regular writing as much as I would like to, but I have many more topics on the backburner which will make an appearance in the coming months.
I’ve had readers reach out who experience many of the same realizations and although it’s a fairly niche readership, I’m happy to add to that community. I think even outside of running, there’s a lot to be discussed about simply living a healthy and active lifestyle, however you want to go about that. It can be swimming, walking, biking, hiking, whatever you like most, as long as it helps to balance and re-invigorate the other parts of your life
You’ve been quoted as saying that you struggle with anxiety. When did this begin for you and how have you learned to manage it?
I have struggled with anxiety for as long as I can remember, but only in the last ten years have I been able to name it and recognize it. A lot of the expectations and demands in classical performance training go against my natural demeanor, and it took years for me to recognize that. I’m a quiet, reserved person most of the time and need a lot of time alone to recharge. The contrast is drastic between that quiet state and performing complex, involved work on stage in front of audiences.
The positive thing is that there are ways to navigate these feelings and to build a lifestyle and professional output to match my own energy. I now have much more balance in my life between artistic/professional pursuits and self-care time for recharging. Running is a part of this, family time is a part of this, even reading is a part of this.
I now find comfort in playing, performing, and recording, because I’m going about it in my own way with my own guidance, and am creating work I feel passionate about. The nerves are still there on performance days, but it’s in an exciting and comforting way rather than a fighting and/or flighting way.
Your music has been described as “warmly embracing storytelling.” Can you tell us more about what this means and how it plays out in the pieces you compose?
I’ve been told many times that my music would be suited to film, and film scoring has been a dream of mine to become involved in. Even now, my music often has programmatic through-lines, even if it’s not explicitly stated. I’ve even used texts with instrumental pieces to give a narrative framework to the piece and the rhythmic and tonal worlds.
Although much of my music is instrumental and seemingly abstract, it almost always has a story which I can put into words. Sometimes that is an external story of a topic I am exploring, and sometimes it’s simply a personal feeling or exploration into some part of my own existence.
The head and the heart are inexorably intertwined in my music, so even in the most complex passages, there’s still a warmth and a brightness glowing through.
Congratulations on the recent release of Insights, a 12-part concept album featuring you as both composer and pianist! What inspired you to release a solo album after the ECMA and Nova Scotia Music Awards-nominated Breathe In, Breathe Out, which you recorded with cellist India Gailey and fellow pianist David Potvin?
Thank you! I’m really proud of this project.
Part of the inspiration was practical and part of it was a desire that had been building for a couple of years. I had a few contracts ending at the same time, allowing me about four weeks of relative freedom to pursue a long-held idea. I like pushing myself in comfortable environments and wanted to see what I could do with a definite timeline and limited resources.
So, I began filling out and expanding some sketches I had been keeping, as well as exploring the idea of a hybrid notated/improvised score. The nature of this meant that I could set up patterns and series of notes which would morph, but not necessarily have the need to write down every single note. This meant that I could work incredibly fast and create the whole piece rather quickly.
Also, coming out of my previous album project, I wanted to be able to work at my own pace and have the flexibility to do (or not do) whatever I wanted at any given time in the creation process. I love my team from Breathe In, Breathe Out, but having total freedom with Insights was invigorating.
I also wanted to keep the energy of performance and those moments of improvisation in the recording, so I laid down all the tracks in one day. Some of the tracks on the album were a single take, and I love that fresh unreserved energy about them.
One of the many things I love about the music featured on Insights is the partnership and trust you place in the performer. I understand that most of these tracks are a combination of strictly composed ideas and lots of space for improvisation. Why do you feel it’s important to give performers this freedom with your music?
That’s a very thoughtful question. As a pianist I have loved it when a composer has written for me with freedom of performance built into the work. I feel it allows for a more complete and whole partnership in the creation of a piece. Instead of a performer trying to fit their own style, technique, and sensibilities into a composer’s piece, it allows for the performer to embrace the piece more fully.
There are pianists, obviously, who are gold-standard incredible and can chameleon themselves into whatever style they are playing. I have never quite been that sort of pianist, so I appreciate it when my personal performance style is celebrated in a new work. In this way I want to build that lively and vital connection between performer and composer, and Insights is my first full attempt at exploring some of these methods.
Now that I’ve recorded this piece, the next step is to sit down with a few piano friends to talk through the clearest ways to present these moments of improvisation on paper. I have a score with many performance notes notated for me, but I want to make sure that anyone picking up the score can successfully play the piece with no fear of any of the structured improvised sections. The clearer I can present these ideas on paper in this piece, the clearer I can become in future projects.
Tell me about “Fly,” one of my favorite tracks on this album. What inspired this piece, and why does it end with a slightly melancholy sense of floating away?
It’s one of my favourites too! For the four weeks I was working on Insights before recording, “Fly” was the working title for the whole piece/album. It was the first track to be written and it immediately launches into ideas with improvisation, changing patterns, and the rhythmic energy which goes through much of the whole work.
My idea with this opening movement was to fly with an idea, go with it for a while, land, and then fly again. As you’ve mentioned, it does change quickly and goes in a different direction by the end. This is something I love to do – a sort of through-composed structure with a sense of changing adventure. I knew the energy with which I wanted to start this track, and I knew I wanted “Remember My Heart” to be after it, so after flying into the active energy at the start, it starts to retreat inward towards a place of heartache, nostalgia, and love of many sorts.
The expressively quiet track, “If I Stay Silent, Will I Disappear?” captures uncertainty and the feeling of unanswered questions. What can you tell us about your inspiration for the piece?
This piece directly asks a question related to an anxiety-causing feeling I’ve dealt with which I’ve heard echoed by several colleagues and musical friends. At some point many of us are taught indirectly that our art is our identity, fully and completely. Then the question arises, if I’m not performing or recording, am I fading away? There was a shift in my life that was natural and then spurred on by the worldwide pandemic of performing less and spreading my creative energies across other projects. Because I had built up an identity so dependent on performing, I began feeling anxious that I was professionally and artistically disappearing.
Reflections on this spurred me to play quietly one night – I wanted to just play something and to make sound. The result was this repetitive, almost meditative, repeated progression using strumming inside the piano and some other held-note techniques. It was a way to calm myself, to tap into my creative core, and to say in my own way, “I matter, I’m still here”.
This piece also has the curious element of sounding calm, still, and predictable while being technically difficult to play. The choreography between the played elements is precise and it reflects the busy anxiety I sometimes feel while the exterior outward facing me is calm and collected.
I was intrigued by the performance techniques you used in “Scratch.” Why do you feel these best tell the story of this piece, which you write is about how we scratch at discomfort?
This piece doesn’t land anywhere, and it’s not really meant to. There is little melody, not a lot of structure, and the rhythm is the only aspect that carries any musical momentum. I want the scratching of fingernails on string to be a central part of the sound of this movement and it’s meant to be more of a rhythmic sound moment than a structured piece.
In this album I explore many ideas regarding my own mental health journey and some of the realizations and solutions I’ve learned. I don’t know even close to everything though, and this track is a nod to that. Whatever happens in this track is not answered and not even expanded upon. It’s a moment in time when things are a bit messy and ambiguous, and that’s okay.
You write that one of my favorite tracks, “Luminosity” is “full of brightness, energy, movement, and light.” Tell me how your debt to the music of Ann Southam and John Adams influenced the creation of this piece.
When you spend hundreds of hours with music like that of Ann Southam and John Adams as I have, you build certain skills, techniques, and patterns which can be expanded and played with. Some performers have glittering, sparkling, flawless scales, and their time spent practicing and performing Mozart is to that, in part. My time spent practicing and performing huge minimalist works for piano means that I have a wealth of experience which I can tap into in my own work. I see how these patterns are created, can change them, and can create my own to give a desired energy to a piece while exploring new musical languages.
I have always held a fascination with interlocking rhythmic patterns and having dissected how different patterns might sound, I’m able to reconstruct them in ways that suit the story I’m trying to tell. Honestly, at this point many of these repeated passages sound much more complex than they feel for me to play.
The underlying rhythmic complexity is something my mind adores and by putting my heart into these patterns I feel that my musical voice is able to sound out in an earnest way.
You write, “The whole album, Insights, is an exploration of mental health: some of the challenges faced, the journeys that we go through, and the sharing of these struggles.” Can you tell us more about this?
I learned at some point throughout my schooling that I would not be a performing concert pianist in the most recognizable sense of that title. That means big concert halls, classical-centered programs, touring the world. Maybe it was my young naivety that thought that was the only way to “make it”, but when I got past that idea, I had to decide what to do. Did that mean I was done? I struggled with it. Thankfully I had some fantastic teachers who supported students as people first, musicians next, and who supported my passions, like composing.
I’ve always had an affinity towards contemporary music and have really sunk into composing my own music in the past few years. This has helped with building up a unique sense of musical identity. I don’t feel like I’m getting lost in the shuffle anymore. I’m working on projects and with people I would never have thought I would, and it’s exciting. It’s not a strictly classical path and that’s okay – it’s actually wonderful.
I’ve talked with many fellow musicians about imposter syndrome and the feeling that we’re faking it or not belonging, or that everyone else knows exactly what’s going on and how to do things. It’s a hard feeling to shake and work through, but I think having that feeling shows a vulnerability which can be important in truly expressing your art. Having the realization that many of us are working through the same feelings can help greatly in self-realization, and in building community.
I just believe that it is important to acknowledge struggles, have a supportive community, and to continue discussion on our mental health. This piece explores many aspects of my own journey and is simply meant to keep the discussion going. This album doesn’t have a wealth of answers, but hopefully has some comfort, encouragement, and catharsis for those who listen.
Will you offer sheet music for Insights and, if so, where might we purchase it?
I will, in the coming weeks! I’d like to workshop and clarify some of the notations, but you will be able to find it on my website soon: edwardenman.com
What advice can you offer to young musicians who are seeking to create musical careers for themselves?
Create what you want as much as you feel you can.
Make good relationships with everyone you get to work with.
Cherish your audience and your listeners.
Take care of yourself first and your art will follow.
Stay curious.
Edward Enman is a pianist and composer whose music warmly embraces storytelling, multi-media, collaboration, and innovative performance experiences.
As a recording artist, performer, and creator, Edward strives to create meaningful connections with listeners while breaking down stylistic barriers in the classical music world. He holds an enthusiasm for compelling programming and enjoys combining the old with the new.
His first full-length album of original music Breathe In, Breathe Out was funded by FACTOR Canada and features works for piano duo and piano/cello. This album received nominations for Classical Album/Composer of the Year from the East Coast Music Awards and the Nova Scotia Music Awards. His newest 2023 album Insights features Edward returning as both pianist and composer.
As a soloist and collaborative performer, he performs regularly across Canada, working with such ground-breaking forces as India Gailey, David Potvin, and Rose-Naggar-Tremblay. His compositions have been premiered and performed around the world, and he has recently held residencies with the Amadeus Choir of Greater Toronto, Labo de musique contemporaine de Montréal, Westben Performer-Composer Residency, 1:2:1 Intensive, (Art) Song Lab and a commission project with the SHHH!! Ensemble. Edward’s music and performances can be heard regularly on CBC Radio and Radio Canada.
Dr. Enman holds degrees in solo piano performance from the University of Montréal (DMus), University of Ottawa (MMus), and Acadia University (BM). He is currently based with his family in Montréal, Canada. Edward also runs marathons and is an avid baseball fan. (edwardenman.com)