Pianist Stephen Prutsman Joins SFCM Faculty

Stephen Prutsman is hard to pin down.

His impressive list of achievements on paper—fourth place in the 1990 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition; second in the 1991 Queen Elisabeth Competition; recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant—only nod at his wide-ranging career.

"One of the blessings of being a musician in this day and age is that in some cases it's mandatory that you have to diversify," Prutsman says, though he actually began performing professionally in a different day and age at the age of 13. "I grew up in a small town in Southern California near the desert," he says. "My dad was an amateur singer, so he taught me all the jazz standards," which enabled Prutsman to start working in cocktail lounges. 

Among his more colorful gigs, he was employed playing ragtime piano at Shakey's Pizza, telling MinnPost in 2016, "It paid $3.50 an hour, which was a lot for the time. Wearing a straw hat, white shirt, red bow tie and arm band, I got up at an old beat-up piano. Sometimes, when the crowd got unruly—after a football game, when folks had been drinking—I had to dodge pieces of thrown pizza." Prutsman was also music director for a nationally syndicated fundamentalist televangelist program, The King Is Coming, and, foreshadowing his later competition wins, won an episode of The Gong Show in 1976.

Prutsman played in rock bands through the 1970s, collecting enviable early synthesizers like an ARP Odyssey and a Minimoog, and nurturing a love of 1970s progressive rock has led him to incorporate songs by Yes and Gentle Giant into his solo piano repertoire. But at the same time, he was also studying with Aube Tzerko, one of renowned Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel's assistants. "Our lessons went on for hours," Prutsman remembers. "He only taught Saturdays, and had two people on Saturday. He was independently wealthy, so he didn't have to worry about charging by the hour."

Next, Prutsman moved across the country to study with Leon Fleisher—"I said goodbye to popular music, about 95 percent of the music on the planet, to focus on the other 5 percent," he quips. Shortly after his back-to-back competition medals, he moved to San Francisco in 1993.

Prutsman's most headline-grabbing association is with San Francisco's own Kronos Quartet, one of the most famed string quartets of the modern era, for whom he was in-house arranger for 10 years, contributing over 50 arrangements. "They 'allowed' me one original piece," he jokes, "which I'm very proud of. It's changed titles, but at the time it was called Particle 423: Each member had a synth, percussion, the violist played theremin—my ode to Bernard Herrmann scores."

Drawing on that cinematic influence, one of Prutsman's other projects concerns silent movie scores. A fan of old Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy comedies, Prutsman told SFCV in 2022, "In the old days, when some of these films premiered and the studio would mail the reels out to the theaters, the reels would arrive on a Monday, and with them the studio might include a sheet of snippets of tunes suggested for the organist [at each theater] to improvise on."

Later Chaplin movies, he added, would have scores composed by the actor himself, but "most of the time there weren’t specific scores for movies." A historic book of cues in his collection sheds light on how the in-theater keyboardists would score films: "You’d see Mendelssohn's Rondo Capriccioso there, which might work for a scene with an airplane. For a battle, you'd have some Beethoven thrown in, or Chopin's 'Funeral March' for a cemetery scene."

Prutsman now has an annual series with members of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra  and the Minnesota Orchestra that showcases silent films and their music. "These through-composed works for different ensembles have probably the most legs out of all the music I've written," he says wryly. "There are over 15 of them now for people to play along with the movie; they're all on a click track."

Describing his own career as happening "project by project," Prutsman says his pedagogy centers around. "Let's realize the project together. Let's look forward and then make it happen. Pick something, engage with it. Let's brainstorm on how, say, your love of Beethoven intersects with your love of light, or nature, all of these things."

"Be intentional," he continues. "The only thing in life that's fair is that we all get 168 hours a week. That's a good starting point, I think."

Learn more about studying piano at SFCM.