As a young cellist, one of the first things I learned was that a page of music waits, quietly. A musical score, says pianist Jeremy Denk, is “at once a book and a book waiting to be written.” The act

My mother is a phenomenally smart woman – virtually everything she says is correct. Sadly, even after 31 years of listening to her sage advice (read: nagging), I still find myself occasionally having to admit that, yet again, I was

Could virtual concerts become the norm following the COVID-19 outbreak? With economies, companies and groups around the world taking a major financial hit due to lockdown restrictions, some orchestras and ensembles might have to rely upon the virtual world to

As a composer and concert reviewer, I sit in a unique position of being someone who creates music and then has to write about it. Leonard Bernstein was a composer, conductor and educator like few others. Here Leonard Bernstein discusses

Managing the physical symptoms “Each time, before I went on stage, I began to think, ‘How can I go on playing the piano, if this is what it’s going to be like?’” – Steven Osborne, concert pianist The physical symptoms

In this, the first of a series of articles, I will look at the origins and causes of Performance Anxiety. Subsequent articles will offer strategies for managing anxiety. For many musicians, “stage fright” or Performance Anxiety is the fear which

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture Oft quoted, frequently mis-attributed, this statement brilliantly captures the difficulty of writing about something abstract, what Ferruccio Busoni called ‘sonorous airs’ – the music itself. There’s an over-abundance of writing about music

Today is March 26th, 2020, the 15th day of a first self-imposed, and now state-imposed isolation period. And I’m already sick of the live-streaming pandemic that has hit us. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy solidarity as much as