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Published: Tuesday, 12 November 2024 at 09:00 AM
Ethan Loch: the blind pianist with an astonishing synaesthetic sense of hearing
Read on to discover more about blind pianist Ethan Loch and his finely-tuned sense of hearing…
Ethan Loch… an astonishing sense of hearing
It’s a sound that most performers know – or at least aspire to know – well. There’s the polite smattering that ripples around a room like a stone thrown into water, or the impromptu percussive burst that fills an auditorium. But, as Ethan Loch explains, there are many other types of applause – the pianist can often identify individual clapping styles within the audience.
This has nothing to do with vanity or need for praise (although who doesn’t like to know they’ve been well received?). It is because Loch has a highly developed sense of hearing. As the 19 year-old concludes his recital at Budleigh Music Festival, St Peter’s Church erupts with rapturous excitement. Since 2005, the event has been a highlight for this Devon town, which counts Richard Rodney Bennett and Hilary Mantel among its former residents. Loch cannot see the standing ovations, but he can hear each one. Unfolding his white stick, which has been stored on the keyboard’s music stand, the pianist moves centre stage, beaming.
How did Ethan Loch learn to play the piano without sight?
As a child, Loch – who was born without sight – remembers playing notes on the piano and listening intently to the overtones. These are present in most sounds, but generally we hear single frequencies, and the majority of Western classical music is based on a given harmonic series – with the exception of works such as Georg Friedrich Haas’s 11,000 Strings, which is scored for 50 pianos tuned in microtones.
For example, most people would play ‘middle C’ on the piano and hear a single note (it’s slightly different with wind instruments, where each note is an amalgamation of the harmonic series). Loch realised he was hearing multiple partial sounds and became fascinated by the experience. He also discovered each pitch triggered different movements in his body, known as hearing-motion synaesthesia.
How does Ethan Loch’s hearing-motion synaesthesia work?
‘If I lean like this, that’s a B, or like this – it’s a C,’ Loch explains, demonstrating the changing positions from a chair in the vestry. He stands up suddenly: ‘That’s F natural.’ There are many types of synaesthesia – sensory crossover – with an estimated 150 forms in existence. Musicians are generally associated with sound-colour synaesthesia, which can manifest as a link between a key signature and a particular shade. Ligeti described ‘major chords are red or pink, minor chords are somewhere between green and brown’, while Scriabin associated colours with the various harmonic tones of the scale. In his autobiographical Recollections, Rachmaninov recorded a conversation he had with Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov, who both maintained that D major is golden-brown.
‘I’ve never experienced sight,’ explains Loch. ‘It’s almost as if my brain has converted a visual synaesthesia to something physical.’ You might expect this understanding of sound to translate into a dance-like performance, but his Chopin Polonaise and Debussy Préludes were restrained to the end, with all focus given over to the music. That’s intentional, because, as the connections are completely instinctive, you can’t choose the movement associated with each note. ‘It’s very jarring,’ Loch explains. ‘It doesn’t often fit the shape of the music. When I was younger, I did used to move synaesthetically and the result was ridiculous – I don’t think it works on stage at all.’
Ethan Loch… a BBC Young Musician keyboard winner
Perhaps not, but it seems a shame to have to suppress something so closely aligned with what is an incredible understanding of sound. I’m joined in the vestry by Jason Thornton, artistic director of Budleigh Music Festival since 2019, who is a big supporter of Loch’s distinctive style. Thornton has programmed the young pianist as this year’s Rising Star, the festival’s ongoing series, alongside the superstar Benjamin Grosvenor. The two pianists have something in common: both have won the keyboard section of BBC Young Musician, Grosvenor in 2004, Loch in 2022.
‘Having a career as a pianist is not a mountain that you can climb without people opening the doors,’ reflects Loch. ‘The competition pointed me to some of those doors.’ The then-17 year-old had always known how important the piano was to him, but taking part in BBC Young Musician confirmed it. ‘As soon as I played with [conductor] Mark Wigglesworth and the BBC Philharmonic, I knew this was something I wanted to do for my entire life,’ he smiles.
Ethan Loch… help from ‘readers’ to explain written music
I hope that it’s not ableist to point out that becoming a professional concert pianist is particularly challenging for someone without sight, I say. Loch agrees: ‘I have naturally spent more time mimicking what I hear; it wasn’t until I went to Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester that I really toughened up my technical virtuosity.’ That’s obvious: his Chopin Ballade No. 4 in F minor is woven silk; the Liszt ‘Paganini’ Etude No. 2 is secure and tightly crafted. Having spent the early part of his life in Canada, Loch now lives in Glasgow where he is currently studying at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He has an unusual ‘citizen of the world’ accent that blends a North American twang with Scottish cadence. ‘I had some delayed language development, so I didn’t speak until I was quite old,’ he explains. ‘I learned a lot from television and audio books.’
In order to really delve into scores at the level Loch requires, he has help from ‘readers’ who work with him to explain what’s on the page and give demonstrations. It’s an expensive resource that isn’t always readily available. In the age of AI, you might, as I did, assume there is some fantastic robotic score-reading support, but many musicians without sight still rely on braille scores. It doesn’t suit everyone, and Loch prefers to play by ear.
Ethan Loch… Not all blind musicians are the same
That brings us to a difficult topic: the tendency to view blind musicians as a homogenous group. ‘I’m actually glad you brought that up,’ he says. ‘The loss of sight often comes with other things. We all have different bodies, some of us have additional physical disabilities or different ways of thinking and that allows us to have individual musical experiences. Even someone with the same conditions as me will have a different experience of tone colour.’
We talk about Lucy, the pianist who won Channel 4’s The Piano in 2023 and went on to play with series judge Lang Lang at the Coronation Concert. Lucy – known only by that moniker – is an extremely gifted musician who is also blind and neurodivergent. Aged 13 during the time of her BAFTA-winning performance, Lucy was unable to speak, yet played Debussy in a way that clearly communicated all she wanted to say. Like Loch, Lucy hears applause in a very acute way. Unlike Loch, she finds the noise uncomfortable; it was difficult not to feel concern about her wellbeing as she covered her ears when clapping ensued.
Blind pianists throughout history
There have been blind pianists as long as there have been pianos. The Austrian aristocrat Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759-1824) moved in the same circles as Haydn and Salieri – and may have been the dedicatee of Mozart’s Concerto No. 18. Paradis lost her sight in childhood and reportedly developed exceptional hearing and memory, allowing her to amass a large number of concertos alongside her own compositions, many of which are lost. She was the topic of Errollyn Wallen’s 2022 opera The Paradis Files, produced by Graeae, the theatre company named after three sisters in Greek mythology who shared one eye and one tooth.
More recently, Nobuyuki Tsujii, who won the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition, demonstrated that blindness need not hinder musicianship when he gave a gripping performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and conductor Domingo Hindoyan at the 2023 BBC Proms.
Ethan Loch… on composing
One area where Loch feels greater freedom is composition, which often features narrative arcs imagined during visceral dreams. He’s currently finishing his first concerto and has long been obsessed with Rachmaninov, Chopin, Schumann and the Romantic sound – his own music is firmly in that mould. The invention of a ‘Ballaturno’, for example, combines a ballad and nocturne, reflecting the night-time storytelling aspect. Ballaturno No. 3 in D minor is about a particular ‘vision’ in which Loch found solace in sound. ‘I felt lost and could hear voices,’ he says. ‘It was actually quite frightening, but when I focussed on the melodies, I was home – that’s where I want to be.’
Ethan Loch performs with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at Usher Hall, Edinburgh on 29 November and at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 30 November.