Piano Inspires Podcast: Midori Koga

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

Andrea McAlister: How do you maintain—I’m not even going to say balance because I don’t know that we can say in a balance—how do you maintain that motivation, inspiration, that keeps that passion going in yourself so that you can model that for others?

Midori Koga: It’s a really great question, and I’d love to ask you, too. [laughs] One of my great privileges is playing with my trio. I’m with a soprano and a clarinetist, and the three of us started playing together about 12 years ago. We live in different cities. Kim lives in Texas, and Lindsay lives in North Carolina, and I live in Toronto. And we happened to come together. Each one of us kind of knew the other one, and then we came together and did a couple of concerts, and there was a synergy as people, as three mothers and three women, working women, and as musicians. 

We play, we commission new works.The piano/soprano/clarinet combination is a little unusual, so we have been writing grants and commissioning works, and working with kind of a family of living composers. We keep going back to them, and they’re dear friends. We keep going back to these composers, I think because they tell stories of life and joys and gratitude and sometimes life and death, and a lot of parenting.

One piece that we just commissioned, is by Ivette Herryman Rodriguez, and she’s a woman from Cuba and is living in the States. We just sat together in a brainstorming session, and she said, “I would love to write a piece of music that somehow conveys this in-between. My home is Cuba, and my home is in the United States, but one foot in each place sometimes makes me feel like I’m in another world. And sometimes that’s special, and sometimes it’s lonely.” She expressed it so beautifully, and it’s something that I kind of responded to. I’m in Canada, I lived in the US, and I’m of Japanese heritage, and sometimes I feel, “Where do I belong?” In experiences like that where we talk as a trio, [we talk] a lot about what is our voice as a trio? What is our voice individually as musicians, and what is the voice of the composer and telling that story, and who are our audiences? 

Every time my students have said that they like it when I go away. Oh, I should think about why they’re saying that, but they like it. Let me see what they mean. [laughs] So they like it when I go away, because when I come back, you know, I have stories that I can share, and also I’m reminded again about the importance it is, “I know you’re stressed out, right?” They’re really feeling the pressure of upcoming recitals. It’s coming close to the year end, and you know, [I try] to help them remember that there’s a reason why you’re here. There’s a kernel of that passion and love and joy and a connection to the music that you’re playing and that you’re playing music of composers who have stories to tell, even as long ago composers. But now they’re playing more and more living composers, and I’m so glad to see that really blooming in recent years.

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

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