JustArts: How long have you been playing piano?Jared Redmond: I began taking piano lessons at age five. We had an old Steinway square grand piano, which is basically only useful as a coffee table, and I was used to banging on it already, so my mother lined me up for lessons.

JA: How did you know that you wanted to pursue playing the instrument professionally?

JR: I decided that I wanted to be a "concert pianist" at a very young age, probably at seven or eight years old. But at that time I really had no idea what a concert pianist did, except that they got to play alot and were admired. To add to this problem, at a young age I went through several small-town, well-meaning but ultimately inept teachers whose greatest collective shortcoming was not teaching me practice discipline. This problem was compounded by the fact that they also didn't or couldn't teach me the really rudimentary technical and musical basics necessary not only for piano playing but also for classical music performance in general. Those concepts had to come much later for me, and it took many years of blood, sweat, and tears for them to really take hold.

JA: Were you classically trained?

JR: Although I consider those early teachers of mine "classical" teachers, I really consider my serious music education to have begun very late, at about age thirteen or fourteen. When participating at a summer music camp in my hometown of Napa, California, I met a teacher who was there to fill in for a colleague, apparently. I believe I took his course on chamber music. Well, the short story is that under his encouragement, or perhaps his intimidation, I practiced harder in those two weeks than I'd ever practiced in my life before. As they say, in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed are kings. I was used to nothing but accolades, and so when he took my mother aside and said "Your son is very talented, but his sight-reading and technique are on the level of my eight-year-olds" I threw a fit. My parents were smart enough to force me to leave my current teacher, and my mother agreed to commute an hour each way once a week so that I could have an intense two- to three-hour lesson with this teacher. In a few years he had basically whipped me into shape, and it's really to him that I owe my current life in music.

JA: How do you balance both composition and performance?

JR: I suppose the short answer is that I don't! Needless to say, it's very difficult. What generally ends up happening is that I have to really prioritize one over the other. If I have a recital coming up soon, composition gets put on the back burner, and if a commission or a composition project for school is coming due, I barely spend an hour at the keyboard a day. I'm looking to find a better balance, but the scale usually seems to dip in one direction or the other. I never totally put one on hold for the other though. Both coexist to some extent.

JA: How is the experience different for you between performance and composition?

JR: I was once told by a friend who is a brilliant musicologist and a renown performer that composition is a "truly creative act" and that performance is merely a "recreative act". This is basically true, although I don't think "merely" should enter into it. I should mention that I haven't yet written any substantial works for myself to perform at the piano. This is probably due to feeling a bit minimized and intimidated by the wealth of incredible keyboard music written over the last four- to five-hundred years, as well as to the fact that I simply prefer most of the great composers' music over my own. Perhaps this will change in the future, but I'll have to write something really good! Other than that, I'd say the greatest difference is sometimes wanting to be able to perform a piece of mine. Like most composers of the past, once the piece is written I basically stop interacting with the piece from a compositional standpoint, and I begin interacting with it on an interpretational plane, as if it was somebody's else's. Because of this, I have strong feelings about the interpretation of the piece that are often hard to communicate through the paltry amount of rehearsal time given to new music, but ultimately I accept this because I'm confident that if my music continues to increase in quality, so will the quality of the musicians who choose to play it.

JA: How do you choose performance pieces for your recital?

JR: First of all, I only play pieces I love. This is a cardinal rule of mine that I think more performers should follow, as I'm not convinced that all players typically think this way. When there is fascination with the piece at hand, you finds more desire to work hard, to dig deep and discover whatever one feels the essence of a piece it, and eventually (hopefully) to go beyond that into what makes the piece truly yours-the way a performer can, by virtue of his uniqueness as a person, sort of "filter" the composition through their own personality and come up with an interpretation that is in some way both faithful to the "essence" or "spirit" of the composition (whatever that may be) and unique as a subjective acting-out of that essence. That being said, I like to have pieces on a concert program which are from different eras of classical music or at least that contrast in style.

JA: How was the experience working with John Korty on the documentary Miracle in a Box?

JR: John Korty is a phenomenal filmmaker; everything in his work is flowing, logical, human. There are some fantastic artistic touches in "Miracle" that one has to see to appreciate. (Anyone who's seen the film will remember a scene of slowly swirling gold paint in a can while a melancholy chord of a modern piano work by Henri Dutilleux fades away in the background. Sublime!) Ultimately, the movie isn't overly cerebral or specialized, nor does it pander in any way. Both music lovers and people with no background in instruments or the arts can see the film and get something rich out of it, which to me is one of the signs of a successful artist.