Salomón Mikowsky: The search for truth through music

Pianist and teacher Salomón Mikowsky has died in Manhattan.

Mikowsky, born in Cuba to Polish Jewish parents, received his first lessons from César Pérez Sentenat, who was a student in Paris of Joaquín Nin, himself a student of Moszkowski, a disciple of Liszt. He also studied music theory with Argeliers León and solfège with Luis Pastoret. After obtaining a scholarship at the Juilliard School, he continued his studies in New York with Sasha Gorodnitzki, an outstanding disciple of the legendary Russian virtuoso Josef Lhevinne; there he obtained Bachelor's and Master's degrees. Subsequently, he did a Doctorate at Columbia University.

Professor of the Piano Faculty of the Manhattan School of Music for more than 50 years, he received the Presidential Medal for Distinguished Contribution awarded by the Manhattan School of Music. He has given master classes in the most important conservatories around the world. His students have always achieved numerous successes, have been soloists in Symphony Orchestras in several countries and have won prizes in prestigious international competitions.

Salomón Mikowsky organized, partially financed and directed -in creative complicity with the Historian of the City of Havana, Eusebio Leal Spengler and the team of the Gabinete de Patrimonio Musical Esteban Salas- the Encuentro de Jóvenes Pianistas that has had numerous and brilliant editions in the Cuban capital since 2013.

The following text, unpublished until now, was originally written in English by the Spanish pianist Mateo Lorente Romero, director of the Rodolfo Halffter Conservatory of Music in Móstoles, Spain.  Magazine AM:PM thanks to the Gabinete de Patrimonio Musical Esteban Salas and the author for the honor of letting us publish this beautiful reflection on a great musician, cultural promoter, and teacher of generations.

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I wish I could have written these words in Spanish, Salomón, and my mother tongue. Mother means strength, clarity, and compromise. The subtlety of meanings is better communicated in one’s language where we have experienced our first impressions of life.

Understanding Salomón's creativity, sensitiveness, and behaviors is necessarily connected with his native Havana. Havana is rhythm, Havana is vibrant life, Havana is where everything starts. This can only be understood if we can walk in Centro Havana or Havana Vieja where life suppurates enthusiasm and a strong attachment to the wide meaning of passion. The sounds of Havana are profoundly stuck in his soul. The afternoons at the beach, and the night escapes for “croqueticas” made a deep trace in what he has become as an adult.

Photo: Courtesy of Miriam Escudero and the Gabinete de Patrimonio Musical Esteban Salas.

Salomón has always had this intense attraction for beauty, in all its manifestations. From human physical beauty to the highest, embodied in the arts and especially in music. It started with his admiration for Germán's mother in his childhood, when he would spend time listening to conversations about art and learning what life is all about. This attraction to beauty has been his a leitmotiv and at the same time its drama. Beauty in itself is drama, we will never be able to apprehend it. We can admire it, enjoy it, but never appropriate it. After realizing that it is impossible to achieve perfection, he decided to devote himself to one of the most inspiring professions that can exist: the art of taking possession of something and passing it on to the next generations. And that's quite a challenge.

The way he understood teaching hasn’t just been transmitting knowledge but bringing out from students all their potential, working on their weaknesses, and making them enjoy their strengths. Respecting every student's personality, he tried to explore the most out of them. Sometimes the vulnerability of the human soul made some of them abandon when he acted as a mirror where students had to face themselves. His teaching was more the art of exposing the human soul at the nudity of itself.

Photo: Manuel Almenares

Completely absorbed by the perfection of bringing sound at its most, he has tried to make us understand that the beauty in sound can surpass all boundaries and bring us a kind of ecstasy that only music can bring. It's like when we walk in the garden and stop to enjoy the scent of the flowers, instead of walking through without stopping.

Reaching for perfection is also sometimes dangerous. There is a point where the mind tired of searching abandons reality and gets installed in a parallel world. The collision between real and parallel worlds has made Salomón face life at the edge. The subtle line between madness and sanity has been very tiny in him. The mind tired of reality abandons to madness. And it also makes a shield against pain, not the physical but the invisible pain of the soul.

Music has been his escape valve. We, his students, have had the chance to enjoy that combination of madness and sanity. Absorbed by his music passion, he has tried to transmit all of it through his restless energy. I could write for hours about many anecdotes over the years, trips, lessons, and conversations. All end up at the same point; the search for truth through music. For those who have not succumbed to institutional religions, music is a balm that leads us near truth; a real truth that is not affected by time or space, nor by human imperfections. We hope to take over his teachings and pass them over so they can remain as a trace in eternity.

*To learn more about Salomón Mikowsky, please access the article On the transcendent, valuable, and memorable aspects of the Young Pianists' Meeting, published in the El Sincopado Habanero.

Photo: Courtesy of Miriam Escudero and the Gabinete de Patrimonio Musical Esteban Salas.

Photo: Courtesy of Miriam Escudero and the Gabinete de Patrimonio Musical Esteban Salas.

Photo: Manuel Almenares