Classical pianist Miki Sawada poses with a piano in an undated portrait. Sawada will be traveling with a piano to perform free shows at several Kenai Peninsula venues during the coming week.

Classical pianist Miki Sawada poses with a piano in an undated portrait. Sawada will be traveling with a piano to perform free shows at several Kenai Peninsula venues during the coming week.

Pianist invites you to gather, hear

Editor’s note: This story has been changed to correct the length of Sawada’s Alaska tour.

Anyone who wants to hear classical piano music played live usually has to travel wherever the piano and pianist are — most frequently to a concert hall or auditorium. Classical pianist Miki Sawada hopes for a different experience by taking her less-than-portable instrument on the road.

This weekend the Brooklyn-based Sawada will be landing in Anchorage for her first visit to Alaska, where she’ll spend three weeks hauling a piano around in a moving van for almost daily performances. Sawada and her piano will be stopping for seven planned shows — and a few unplanned ones, she hopes — on the Kenai Peninsula, appearing at Moose Pass’ Trail Lake Lodge, Veronica’s Cafe in Kenai, Odie’s Deli in Soldotna, and other locations before heading to Talkeetna for a second week of performances in the north.

“At its core it’s a very whimsical idea, and I hope people find it weird and surprising enough to be attracted,” Sawada said.

A filmmaker will follow the two-week Alaska tour, producing a documentary that Sawada hopes will also give insights to the places she visits. The name of the project is Gather Hear Alaska, a pun most obviously on “gather here,” but with other possible meanings as well, Sawada said.

“You could put a comma after ‘gather,’ like ‘Gather, hear Alaska’ — telling everybody else to listen to Alaska, because I’m hoping for the documentary film to get a really neat portrait of Alaskan communities,” Sawada said. “You could also put a comma after ‘gather hear, Alaska.’ That would be like beckoning Alaska to gather.”

Sawada, funded in part with a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum, will be renting a moving van in Anchorage and loading up the piano — a hybrid digital instrument supplied by Anchorage’s Classic Pianos — and driving south to do her first scheduled stop at Cooper Landing on Sunday.

“I think I’m going to have a group of pieces that I can mix and choose from at any point, so depending on the crowd I can wing it,” Sawada said.

She’ll choose the pieces without focusing on specific eras or styles, but with the criteria that they be concise and engaging.

“Most of the pieces are around three minutes long, and focus on getting one core idea across, which makes them enjoyable and accessible to both classical music connoisseurs and first-time listeners,” Sawada wrote in an email.

They may include compositions by Bach, Schumann, Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, as well as pieces written for her by contemporary composers. One will be “The Same Trail,” by Homer native Conrad Winslow. Winslow now lives in Brooklyn also, where Sawada wrote that the two of them “run in the same circles, but haven’t had a chance to meet each other.”

Also in her Alaska repertoire will be pieces Sawada herself has composed with another unusual element for classical music: audience participation. These, Sawada said, were based on the ideas of early electronic composer Pauline Oliveros, who in the early 1970s created a series of “sonic meditations,” written as verbal instructions rather than scores and designed to bring attentive listening to sounds both musical and mundane — to “explore the idea of the division between composer and audience, what is music, what is not,” Sawada said.

“So you’ll have people standing up, making noise, engaging with other people and also with the space,” Sawada said.

Engagement between audience members, she said, is not usually a part of the traditional concert-hall performance, where attention is supposed to flow strictly from audience members to the performer, in a space divorced from the listener’s everyday life. When she sets up her piano in Veronica’s and Odie’s, she’ll be aiming for the opposite.

“I want it to happen in places that are familiar to everyone, already a gathering space,” Sawada said. “And they’ll sit around me, like in a half circle.”

Sawada has played her share of traditional concert-hall concerts, but also spent the first four months of 2016 doing nightly performances with a resident quintet aboard a cruise ship, for an audience who hadn’t necessarily come aboard hoping to hear classical music.

A self-described “nomad,” she’s performed in many venues traditional and otherwise. The stable point in these environments, she said, is the piano itself — an earlier title of her project was “Home is where the piano is.” She’ll be doing her Alaska road trip (anticipating what may be a similar tour of the Lower 48 in the future) with the intent to share this feeling.

“Some classical music is very difficult,” Sawada said. “But there’s such a wide range. I just think it has to be presented in a more engaging way. Not in a way that’s watered down or dumbed down ever. Just in a way that’s more thoughtful about what people want or what people need. And they may not even know they need it in their lives.”

This goal is “the serious side of it,” Sawada said.

“I also just thought it would be fun to put a piano in a van,” she added.

Reach Ben Boettger at benjamin.boettger@peninsulaclarion.com.

Classical pianist Miki Sawada poses in an undated portrait. Sawada will be traveling with a piano to perform free shows at several Kenai Peninsula venues during the coming week.

Classical pianist Miki Sawada poses in an undated portrait. Sawada will be traveling with a piano to perform free shows at several Kenai Peninsula venues during the coming week.

More in News

Kenai Middle School Principal Vaughn Dosko points out elements of a redesign plan for the front of the school on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, in Kenai, Alaska. (Ashlyn O’Hara/Peninsula Clarion)
Work soon to begin on Kenai Middle security upgrades

The security upgrades are among several key KPBSD maintenance projects included in a bond approved by borough voters in October 2022.

The Kenai Fire Department headquarters are photographed on Feb. 13, 2018, in Kenai, Alaska. (Peninsula Clarion file)
Kenai adds funds, authorizes contract for study of emergency services facility

The building shared by Kenai’s police and fire departments hasn’t kept up with the needs of both departments, chief says.

Kenai Parks and Recreation Director Tyler Best shows off a new inclusive seesaw at Kenai Municipal Park in Kenai, Alaska, on Thursday, June 27, 2024. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
Kenai awards contract to develop Parks and Rec master plan

The document is expected to guide the next 20 years of outdoors and recreation development in the city.

Balancing Act’s homepage for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s Fiscal Year 2026 Budget. (Screenshot)
KPBSD launches ‘Balancing Act’ software, calls for public to balance $17 million deficit

The district and other education advocates have said that the base student allocation has failed to keep up with inflation.

Natural gas processing equipment is seen at Furie Operating Alaska’s central processing facility in Nikiski, Alaska, on Wednesday, July 10, 2024. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
Harvest Alaska announces proposed redevelopment of Kenai LNG terminal

The project could deliver additional natural gas supplies to the Southcentral market as early as 2026, developers said.

A depth marker is almost entirely subsumed by the waters of the Kenai River in Soldotna, Alaska, on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
After delay, borough adopts updated flood insurance maps

The assembly had previously postponed the legislation amid outcry from the Kenai River Keys Property Owners Association.

Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche points to where the disconnected baler ram has bent piping at the Central Peninsula Landfill in Soldotna, Alaska, on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
Borough approves federal request to fund recycling redesign

A large baler that was used for recycling was recently left inoperable by a catastrophic failure in its main ram.

A person is detained in Anchorage in recent days by officials from the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (FBI Anchorage Field Office photo)
Trump’s immigration raids arrive in Alaska, while Coast Guard in state help deportations at southern US border

Anchorage arrests touted by FBI, DEA; Coast Guard plane from Kodiak part of “alien expulsion flight operations.”

Jamiann S’eiltin Hasselquist asks participants to kneel as a gesture to “stay grounded in the community” during a protest in front of the Alaska State Capitol on Wednesday focused on President Donald Trump’s actions since the beginning of his second term. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
Trump protest rally at Alaska State Capitol targets Nazi-like salutes, challenges to Native rights

More than 120 people show up as part of nationwide protest to actions during onset of Trump’s second term.

Most Read