I don't believe in endless hours at the piano. I believe some of your best progress often happens away from the piano. That's why two years ago I created, Beyond the Keys, a 3-day piano retreat in beautiful Monterey, California. 🌊This year, it's October 8-11. This is not your typical adult piano camp.Gil said it better than I can... Watch a 90 second trailer here. ⬇️ No grinding. No judgement. No pretending you don't compare yourself to the person next to you. Just a room full of pianists who...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Someone caught it. 23 seconds in, on the Gigue from the B-flat Partita, the one from my 1989 Cliburn audition. A mistake, small, just a switch in the notes. He commented so everyone would hear it. Barely noticeable, but he felt good catching it. 🥺 I replied without thinking twice. "My motto now is Screw Perfect. Just Make Music." 131 likes on that reply. More than the comment that started it. That reel also got me 466 new followers on Instagram which lead to celebrating 10K followers...
10 days ago • 1 min read
I started my 1989 Cliburn audition with the Bach B flat Partita. 👀 Watch it here. ⬇️ Someone left a comment I keep coming back to... Good question. Here's the answer I didn't expect to give. No judge ever told me. No scoresheet. Nothing written down anywhere. I built that story out of an absence. I always paired my Bach with my Chopin. People complimented the Chopin. Every single time. Nobody said a word about the Bach. So I decided the silence meant something. 🤦♀️ No comment became "not good...
17 days ago • 1 min read
I found old footage of my 1989 Cliburn audition. It inspired me to do something a little different. I recorded a message to her. To 27-year-old me, about to walk into that room. Here are highlights of what I told her. She thought it was all or nothing. Get into the Cliburn, or the career she'd worked her whole life for wasn't even possible. That's what she believed in every bone in her body. I know how devastated she was when she didn't get in. She thought that was the end. She didn't know it...
24 days ago • 1 min read
Yesterday, I kicked off Piano Ninja Tricks Live Lab with a question that sounds almost too simple to matter. Why do you play piano? I watched the Tricksters type their answers in real time. Some took thirty seconds. Some took five minutes. I noticed the common thread Listening to mom play as a toddler Dad's own composition, written for Mom Uncle playing Christmas music, while he was held in his lap Family members who played, wanted in A piano at someone else's house they couldn't stay away...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
During my Instagram Live with Adam yesterday, I asked what changed in his practicing since he joined the Piano Ninja Tricksters Club. I expected him to talk about technique. Or how he's tackling the Hammerklavier without losing his mind. He mentioned that too. But he mostly talked about the community. Not the sessions. Not the six stages. Not even the repertoire he never thought he'd play. The people. That surprised me too. I built this to fix a practice problem. Turns out it fixed a lonelier...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Instead of giving up when I was told I'd never play piano again after my hand literally shrunk (of course, many other physical complications too after four surgeries!), I changed my fingering! I'm relearning my soul piece, the Chopin E Minor Concerto. 💕 Pre hand accident, it felt like a walk in the park. Now? Only with a lot of new fingering choices... and hand redistribution (a ton of it!) You can watch some demonstrations of that in my recent YouTube video. 👀 WATCH HERE Even if your hand...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Growing up, I swore by altered rhythms. Hours and hours of dotted-rhythms drilling my Chopin études. Five of them, on my debut recital at age 14. I don't practice that way anymore and haven't since high school. I posted about it on Instagram last week and it did not go over well. Most people pushed back hard. Fair enough, Instagram reels are short, I didn't have room to explain the alternative. So here it is. My real problem with altered rhythms comes down to one thing. When I'm doing a whole...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
I've been playing Amy Beach's "Dreaming" at the same tempo for years. It felt like an andante tempo, as the composer wrote. Then I heard Greg Anderson play it slower. I'm talking seriously slower. 🐢And I stopped mid-scroll and was mesmerized, because something clicked that I didn't want to admit. My tempo wasn't wrong because it wasn't Andante. It was wrong because I'd never questioned it. Here's the thing nobody tells you about tempo: it doesn't just live in your fingers. It lives in your...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read