Piano Inspires Podcast: Leila Viss

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To celebrate the latest episode of the Piano Inspires Podcast featuring Leila Viss, we are sharing an excerpted transcript of her conversation with Andrea McAlister. Want to learn more about Viss? Check out the latest installment of the Piano Inspires Podcast. To learn more, visit pianoinspires.com. Listen to our latest episode with Viss on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or our website!

Andrea McAlister: I do want to go back a little bit to the work you’re doing now, because you are offering a lot of online tools for teachers. I’m really curious about your “composiums” here. So can you tell me about the work you’re doing now with other teachers around the world? 

Leila Viss: Well, I think it comes down to the fact that making music was so important to me. And I am not a published composer or arranger, but I started arranging a lot of things myself, and I loved that. You know, the world faded away when I was working on that project. I’m like, this is feeding my soul. I wonder if other people need to have this too. And then I also created something called Cookie Cutter Composing, which was helping my students compose, and we did eight bars at a time. So we did, you know, section A, then Section B, section A, and it was very rigid, some people would call it, but we were very successful with it. It just happened to come out right before the accident, and then COVID happened. And so I did this with all my students online, and it was perfect. We used Noteflight, so I could see their accounts, all that kind of stuff. So it was, you know, it really helped us all get through a rough time, because we could at least do that creating, you know, yeah, they could play piano. 

But then I sold that resource, but I noticed that people still had questions on it. Teachers were like, well, how do you do this? How do you do that? And I thought, “You know what, I wonder if I need to have some kind of workshop that could help teachers go through the process?” And I don’t know when the word “composium” came to my head. 

AM: I love it, though. 

LV: I like that one. And so I had that feeling of, you know what, if I build it, maybe they’ll come.

I was also inspired by my mother. She is a retired art professor. She’s a quilter, a nationally known quilter. Her quilts are all over the nation, in different galleries, and we’re not talking about just patch work. We’re talking about abstracts, and they’re marvelous. They’re just absolutely gorgeous. But I was always envious of her, because she would go to her quilting workshops, and you bring your sewing machine, you bring your fabric, and you sew with all your other friends, and then you look over their shoulders and see what they’re doing. I thought, now, wouldn’t that be nice if I could do that with a group of teachers, so that we’re all in this atmosphere of, “oh, what are you doing? Oh, that’s cool. Oh, I like that idea.” 

So that brought me to this idea of, well, let’s have eight teachers, and we’ll do eight bars at a time, that kind of a thing. So we’ll piece together, just like we piece a quilt together, we’ll piece together a piece. And now I’m down to six teachers because that was a little bit much, and I have changed maybe a little bit of the format, but it’s a little bit of a piece every time. And then people come, they show us what they’re doing. It’s a very safe environment because I lay down really strict ground rules about how we give feedback. We don’t give feedback. We give feed-forward, those kinds of things so that people can feel comfortable and feel safe. Because I always, when we first listen to a piece, I always tell them that, “Doesn’t it kind of feel like someone’s peeking in your underwear drawer?” Because you know, you’re being very vulnerable, right? 

AM: It does take a lot of courage.

LV: It takes courage, and so I do a lot of mindset things, all those kinds of things, just to get them in the right place.

If you enjoyed this excerpt from Piano Inspires Podcast’s latest episode, listen to the entire episode with Leila Viss on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or our website!

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