My piano journey was a very traditional one for most of my young years. It was largely intellectual, learning from lesson books, attending yearly performance, theory, and sight-reading competitions, and playing all the piano music a young player generally learns. My teacher taught me many beautiful things about music but I never learned anything about creative music making or thought about any larger questions about why people make music in the first place.
Sometimes when I played, I felt wonderful, warm, alive, connected to the listener or other musicians. At these times, music seemed to come from me so easily. But I didn’t know where that feeling came from or how to recreate it.
In my college years my technique got stronger with a more rigorous instructor. He told me that "music wasn't pleasurable until you had mastered it." Even practicing many many hours a day, however, I still wasn't sure how to practice meaningfully so that when I played I could move others to feel the beauty of the music I was playing. When I played my own compositions or played with other musicians, this feeling seemed to come with more ease.
Later in life, after playing in various contexts, I realized that this feeling came when I could stop thinking each note into existence and could freely allow the music to come through me, whether I was playing another composer's music or my own. It sounds simple, but it takes an enormous amount of mindfulness, acceptance, and focus. Training and technique allow the mechanism of making music, your body, to not impede that process. This is the journey I am interested in going on with each of my students from the start. What does it mean to really master something, and in doing so move others to experience the fullness of life? How do we feel that ourselves as we play?
I am less interested in how many hours a student practices than the quality of their practicing and their ability to be present in their music making. I am extremely excited and honored to impart the things it took half a lifetime to learn to my students from the beginning. I wish to help my students with a well-rounded curriculum that not only includes playing classical music and learning to read music well, but also attending performances, making their own compositions, and playing the sort of music that moves them.