Cecil Licad, from S2/ 6
“The practicing is the hardest. Performing for me — it’s also hard. I’m not going to pretend that... but it’s more the process, the practicing process. What fingerings I should use, maybe I use this, but at the concert — it’s hard to explain,” she said. “I’m learning it totally from scratch. That’s how I learn. I don’t listen to recordings. I’m not an ear, like I can play whatever I hear. I relearn from scratch. I will look at the notes very, very slowly, carefully, and then I hear.
“Nobody can recognize me practicing sometimes. That’s why I like to be private when I’m practicing,” she said, saying that when she’s practicing very slowly, she’s sometimes mistaken as a beginner — even by herself. “In fact, I always tell myself that: ‘beginner ka lang. Umpisa ka (you’re just a beginner. You’re just at the start).’ I would tell myself I don’t know how to play piano.”
But all bodies are mortal, and they weaken and, well, stop working at some point. She counts that her career is now 50 years old, but then she pointed out: “One of my teachers debuted in Carnegie Hall, he was already 97.”
“All my teachers — their best playing is at 80-something,” she said. “It’s just different — if you have a good foundation, you can always reinvent. Maybe if ever I lost my hands, I can still play with my elbow,” she said, laughing.
How then, does she maintain all the working parts of her body so when it meets a piano, it constitutes a perfect union? Surprisingly,
the answer is just doing everything else. “You know what I do? I just do other things. I go to the grocery. I organize my things.”
“I’m not particular with my hands at all. Except with knives; cutting onions. That’s very scary. Especially if it’s slippery. There’s an angle. I watch the YouTube stuff, the cooks. You have to have a sharp knife, because if you don’t have a sharp knife, the more you will cut yourself.”
She even gave us a recipe for her clothes’ cleaning spray: Everclear, a grain alcohol bottled at up to 95% (“Whenever I buy it at the liquor store, they would be like, ‘You’re not going to drink this, are you? You’re going to die.’”), mixed with either eucalyptus, peppermint, or tea tree oil. ‘Especially, [since] I smoke. In America, everybody’s smelling you,” she said, sniffing. “‘She’s a smoker. Let’s get out of here.’”
REACHING A PEAK
If her teachers played their best at 80, Ms. Licad in her 60s still has many years to go. Asked if she’s already reached her peak, she said, “I don’t think we’ll ever reach a peak. We will always be in our peak. The last concert has to be your peak. For me, every concert is a peak.
“You can never be confident. You can’t rest on your laurels. I still keep going, and learn a new horizon of another composer, or something I haven’t even tried.
“Maybe I’ll become an actor.”