A man in an oversized tuxedo emerges from backstage. He walks slowly but steadily, bows briefly with a stern, expressionless face, takes his seat and produces some of the most profound music on the piano in a dimly lit hall

Thoughts from a Psychologist and former professional pianist, Heather O’Donnell In my work as a psychologist specialized in working with performing artists, few topics loom as prominently as performance anxiety. It’s an ubiquitous issue and one that manifests uniquely in

The American novelist and short story writer Philip Milton Roth is known for fiction that “features intensely autobiographical characters, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its sensual, ingenious style and for its provocative explorations

Music has the power to tug at the heartstrings, and evoking emotion is the main purpose of music – whether it’s joy or sadness, excitement or meditation. A certain melody or line of a song, a falling phrase, the delayed

It’s one of the most romanticized love affairs in music history: dashing cross-dressing woman novelist George Sand becomes obsessed with, and then seduces, the sickly consumptive pianist-composer Frédéric Chopin. But how much of this story is real, and how much

It seems like we have a “World Day” for everything these days. From hugging a teddy bear to LGBT Center Awareness Day, the entire spectrum of social causes and cultural cheerleading is filling up our daily calendar. I was very

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) penned a vast number of letters, starting from about the age of 14 and ranging to the last month of his life. Literally, thousands of these documents have been preserved, thanks to the foresight of his