This solo recital was won by the pianist as part of a competition prize. Tully Hall was mostly empty. No critics and no bloggers were there to document this considerable piano-playing achievement. And that makes sense -- it wasn't "news."

It may be puzzling that today's highly accomplished, unprecedented classical music playing isn't met with adulation, from most listeners to music. Already in 1979, Roland Barthes could write: "For today's pianist, enormous esteem but no fervor."

Reading accounts of reactions to Liszt's playing, or Paderewski's, leaves me somewhat uncomprehending. With fainting females and teams of white horses conveying the star, "Lisztomania" resembles "Bieber fever" more than anything in today's classical music culture.

Overwhelmingly daunting when it appeared, "Feux follets" represents a pinnacle of 19th-century double-note playing. Jeffery Biegel's excellent command of this etude could still provoke discussion (or envy) at Juilliard 30 years ago. Much more recently, hearing a young prospective student toss off "Feux follets," my colleague Patricia Zander whispered in my ear, "You know that piece used to be difficult!"

We are making a mistake if we consider music -- even virtuoso piano pieces -- to be an achievement. Far better to recognize music as a transaction, a group activity. The receivers are integral to the impact and even the content of the art!

Liszt was an early adopter, exploiting the high Indutrial Revolution technology that was the modern piano. To redo the task now, the letter of the task, is not the same thing at all.

I was recording at Valgeir Sigurðsson's Greenhouse Studios on the outskirts of Reykjavik. It's a carefully curated studio where Bedroom Community's recordings are made. There's very high technology there. At the same time, the overall aesthetic values the "human" -- with attendant quirks and imperfection.

A few weeks before the recording sessions, I emailed Valgeir to ask what kind of piano would be in the studio. "Not a 'concert piano' by any means," he responded, "but a charmingly characterful dirty old thing." He was describing an antique Broadwood grand, fully functioning, and with a particular clarity or edginess of attack. The piano is heard in other recordings of Nico's music, and much else.

It caused me to realize that all my commercial recordings until now were made using Steinway Ds -- the 9-foot concert grand pianos that are a contemporary-classical-music-culture-constant. There are subtle differences among Steinways, but I'd never recorded with anything else.

Live music making is an important ingredient in most recordings. How much to smooth and regularize? How much to conceptualize or apply post-performance insight?

Dave Hickey maintains that good rock music engages us because of many levels of fault. "Glitch music" can be based on errors, unwanted artifacts from recordings -- fleeting accidents cherished. Simple or elaborate cooking can make things delicious. At least sometimes, some foods taste better raw.

For the 21st-century listener, it's simplistic to hear only a single unvarying Affekt or character in an entire movement of old music. We tend to hear the changes.

Mozart's music may offer an extreme, an almost constantly shifting and evolving rendering of human state-of-mind. It's classical-sonata juxtaposition of multiple ideas within one tempo -- carried very far. This is the newness of Mozart's music, and it's lingering appeal. And it resonates with our experience. Walking down the street, how many feelings do you feel? How many thoughts cross your mind?

Performances are not usually rich enough to convey all this chameleon-like behavior, all this morphing and change. So much playing of classical music offers generic, smoothly-wavy beauty. A pretty, bump-free luxury car ride. It's easier.

In the opening phrase of Mozart's Variations, KV 613, I'd like to hear three or four distinct "Affekts." Their delineation -- these quick changes -- can be manifested in sound but is rooted in rhythm.

The initial quarter-note-note upbeat is an entrance into the music -- a transition from outside to inside, a passing through the frame. It's an invitation. It's a kind of Eingang. Its length can be more than a quarter-note, if we're measuring by two of the eighth-notes that follow. With this anacrusis, this note of entreaty, beated time hasn't quite started yet, in my opinion.

The slurred three-note ascent begins with a distinct onset of sound at its first note, a chromatic alteration, a consonant, a tone made as the bow begins a down stroke. This three-note group -- a three-syllable word or a melisma -- ends with a gentle unaccented tapering. The chromatic resistance dissipates in the going up. For me, the highest D is tenderly not-staccato. The following, falling staccato eighth-notes make for a long, unaccented suspense-of-beat, and are less emotionally expressive (back to B flat) than the first three-note group. (Seven chuckles, or laughs?) These notes do not lead to what's coming. They follow from what has already happened.

When the upper solo line is joined by lower parts (when the band comes in, at the end of measure 2) the music is suddenly strongly beated, less personal -- for me, best if almost comically rigorous.

In the postmodern, generalized playing of classical music, long phrases are often spun with slightly hesitant rhythm at cadences. Far more satisfying here is relatively beatless solo delivery at the outset (mm. 1-2), followed by stricter beating with the arrival of ensemble texture, and right through the cadence.

The cultivation of legato -- the binding together of successive tones produced with flexible wrist -- is an important aspect of classical piano training.

Some of us wonder about the science of legato, of what we teach and do. How is it that flexible-wrist-resilient-fingers playing is causing the black box to yield the precious sound elixir? Maybe it's our perception of sound that's altered with these carefully cultivated gestures? (In helping students, I believe it's important to listen and not watch as they work on this technique.)

I've prescribed playing on a kitchen sponge to discover the combined physical sensation of resistance and giving way that is legato. A padded chair seat will do.

Perhaps if piano keys were just made with upholstered key tops? Of course our fingers are themselves "padded." An awareness of the sensation of their give, a physical sensitivity of the finger tips, may be part of legato, part of "singing" tone, of cantabile playing. In Roland Barthes opinion, the pad of the fingers is "the only erotic part of a pianist's body."

To cultivate toneful legato, a colleague tells students to imagine their wrists are moving through a big pot of honey. But unavoidably that mental picture reminds me of Karen Finley's performance piece in which her skin really was honey-doused.

Anything for legato.

In preparation for shooting a video last week, I practiced again a piece that I practiced last year for summer concerts, and two years before that to play in Michigan, and thirteen years earlier still...

Passing by a store on Broadway that had four identical (mass-produced) lamps hanging in a row, I was prompted to tweet this tweet. "Repetition gives an appearance of order," tweeted I.

Musicians are accustomed to repetition. Even music that isn't especially repetitive is subject to considerable repeating in most professional musical lives.

That's our practice, a structuring of time. And for the player, a structuring of a life.

The balance between repeating material and exploring the new is struck differently by musicians. Some pianists play a huge number of pieces. Others delve into a few.

How many times did Paderewski perform the "Moonlight" Sonata? Or Mick Jagger sing "Satisfaction"?

One of the Oblique Strategies of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt is: "Repetition is a form of change."

Our practice can prepare us to receive. Any sense that we don't deserve or are not entitled to extraordinary music making can impede it.

Especially if time is short or preparation is scant, we may play less well than possible because we don't believe we can do better. Our doubts then, rather the lack of preparation, limit the result.

Am I suggesting that performers practice less? Am I advocating huckster Harold Hill's "think system" from Meredith Wilson's Music Man?

It's just to say that suddenly hearing exceptional music coming from our hands can be daunting, and we have to be ready not to get in the way...

The piano is a device that never came with a set of instructions. In a sense, musicians are always making how-to guides. And there are a lot of ways to play the piano. The instrument is a tool, a means of making sounds, a machine used for communicating in music.

It's often confusing to encounter a keyboardist whose physical playing is contrary to our own, and yet hear that the musical results may be plausible.

There's a lot of speculation -- even inspired speculation -- about piano playing. A few researchers have tried to find out more, about how piano tone is produced, or a piece committed to memory. When it comes to physical piano playing, we still know quite little. Ideas from sports medicine and the new area of performing arts medicine have made fairly small impact. In music, a lot of teaching is based on received opinion.

There's a long heritage of piano teachers who had strong impact: Franz Liszt, Tobias Matthay, Theodor Leschetizky, Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein, Heinrich Neuhaus, Rosina Lhevinne, Isabelle Vengerova...

Today, there are quite a few well-known teachers who worked with Dorothy Taubman and who use her ideas about avoiding physical tension and injury. It can't be desirable to play with excessive physical tension.

But on the question of whether the wrist comes up or stays down, I prefer to consider the musical phrase. I do release the wrist (slightly upwards) at the end of every slur, or phrasing tie. Pianists tend to be less aware of long notes than other musicians. Keeping the wrist down through a long note is one small way that linear connection and overlapping phrase designs can be attended to, experienced, and heard.

It made me wonder all over again: Do the sounds a pianist makes from the piano have any relation to that person's physical voice?

For me it's concerning if a musician has a particularly harsh or unmodulated speaking voice. One New York pianist comes to mind ... And, to me, Vladimir Horowitz' low, low speaking voice (in English) was disturbing.

You manage your voice. It may not seem that you choose its qualities. But don't you?

Fashions in speaking-voice sounds change. Just listen to old movies. Smoking changes the tonality or even register of a voice. So does a lot of yelling. In music and in speaking, some harsh sounds may be useful and expressive.

Some pianists actually vocalize, moaning or humming as they play. That vocalizing may be part of the tone of long notes! It is usually a sign that true listening -- to the physical sounds in the room -- is not happening.

The impact of our spoken voice on piano playing is not only a matter of "sound." Particular ways of speaking, and the rhythms, emphasis, and inflection of a mother tongue surely influence the way we make music.

And all of this changes. The North American accents of today's spoken English are not what was heard at the Continental Congress. And I doubt Mozart spoke as a Salzburger living in Vienna might now ...

April 21, 2011
In a way our technology is putting sound and music back together -- as perhaps the technology of writing took music and sound apart.

April 20, 2011
Yes, some of Rachmaninoff's music is very much part of the "Back to Bach" movement.

April 20, 2011
It's not surprising composers borrow or steal so much -- if you consider that we are all just adding to a big collective artwork.

March 28, 2011
Is it because we're NOT fully present in each moment that we need art? Then art is a coping mechanism, a sign of failing to really be alive.

March 21, 2011
If amateurs suffer from their doubt -- then experts suffer from certainty.

www.twitter.com/pianomorphosis

Beethoven: Opus 110

These voice-parts have integrity. We can follow tenor or bass, alto or soprano (viola or cello, second violin or first violin).

This is a modern practice in keyboard music, I believe. The earliest keyboard pieces -- intabulations based on vocal music -- are not so fastidious. Parts come and go.

In such later "original" keyboard music as Frescobaldi's toccatas, keyboard writing that mimics integral, close-position voice parts is juxtaposed with more fantastic passages in which "voices" appear and disappear as texture thickens, or clarifies.

In realizing keyboard accompaniments on the harpsichord (from figures), the player may add more notes to balance a dense texture, or thin out the "part-writing" in a spare context. This extemporaneous practice is notated in the keyboard music of J. S. Bach. At cadences, additional voices may appear. Thicker chords weigh down the texture, perhaps allowing the music to pause or stop.

In this way, the writing in the Arioso in Beethoven's Opus 110 looks Baroque -- with more voices present at cadences. This archaicism is perhaps also a futurism?

In 19th-century piano music, thickening and thinning may involve the signification of adding and subtracting voice-parts. In other instances, something else is going on.

As I've discussed, piano music may (with several notes) signify the sounds of a singer beginning a single note. In Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand, a remarkable effect is notated. (The pedal is indespensible to making this music work.)

In this phrase of music written by Ravel, the apparent arrival of the three-note chord in the upper staff is not really an addition of voices. It is entwined with the complex sonority and texture of strands of the texture going in and out of alignment. It may be a reference to a complex brass timbre -- not a clear focused tone, but an almost choked note, rich in undertones. These apparent voice-parts may be the notation of a timbre! A sound with friction, a sound with drag and grain in it. A jazz trumpet tone engulfed in the thick air of a smoky boîte... (Once again, "les sons and les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir...")

Not suffering disappointment in competitions may keep an artist's work and motivation pure. Not being known to have lost competitions may be useful professionally. Or, lacking the severe scrutiny of the competition platform, a player's potential level of delivery and coherence may not be achieved.

While competitions don't always reward the most powerful artistic communication, they do offer tangible opportunities to play. They may be overheated, or somewhat confining opportunities. But a competition can be a tool -- and used as a workshop.

There's a sense of swinging the body up into relative weightlessness in these passages. After the instructing or narrating of the first section of some Ländler, comes the dancing itself. (After ten minutes of navigating through the relative calm of Newport harbor in a small boat, and raising the sail in more open water, I remember my friend John Davis shouting: "We're sailing!")

Perhaps less expected, is the appearance of yodeling, this registeral see-saw, in Billy Strayhorn's "Take the A Train." The high-up, Alpine lightness-of-being relocates -- to the giddiness of being uptown in Harlem!

In broadcasts of the space missions of the 1960s, surely the most poignant words spoken are: "We have liftoff."

I was not very satisfied with the way I was playing -- near the end of a three-hour rehearsal at Wigmore Hall in London. My friend David Rick suggested that the piano be moved back, much closer to the rear wall of the Wigmore stage. The move was made and not only the sound but my physical ease of playing improved remarkably.

It might seem in large rooms or theaters that the exact positioning of the piano would not matter too much. Perhaps the overall acoustics of the space matter more? After audience members fill seats, the sound may clarify, or deaden.

In theaters with a proscenium, there's often a practice of placing instruments upstage of the arc. Many pianists want to place the piano off center (left to right), so they -- rather than the instrument -- are more in the middle of the stage, and perhaps so more members of the audience can see the keyboard. In the playing of concertos, in order to make everything fit on stage, it may be necessary to move the piano so far forward (nearer the audience) that the best acoustical position is compromised.

In a concert hall, I sometimes spend half an hour playing a phrase or two, then moving the piano, then repeating the phrases, then repositioning. I'm sure particular repertoire influences my opinion of the sound. I'm trying to get to a spot where I can hear what I want to hear. In some halls, the best position for one piano, might be less good for another.

In the making of piano recordings, achieving a balance between all registers of the instrument can be challenging. Often, turning the piano helps. (Bass sounds will be less overwhelming if the strings are not aligned with the back wall.) In some rooms I have turned as much as 30 degrees off axis.

For recording, the piano and the mics must be positioned. After playing a phrase or two in a particular position, I go to the control room and hear a test recording. Positions are measured and marked so that they can be restored. In some situations even very small differences matter. Time may be very limited.

It seems unbelievable that in making my first recording for Arabesque the engineer and I worked more than three days positioning piano and mics!

In Jordan Hall in Boston and in many halls, I prefer the sound of the piano when the soundboard is approximately centered on the stage, left to right. Fewer people in the audience can see my hands, but the sound is better.

At a recent rehearsal in Jordan, lacking nail or hammer, I took this photo of the floor and the piano's back edge. When I returned for the concert I compared the scuffs and marks visible on the floor to be sure that the crew had positioned the piano just as I had preferred it two days earlier.

For me, it would be best if the heavy, syncopated comic accents in the left-hand music do not in any way effect the folk simplicity of the paired-note articulation above, in the highest voice in the right hand part.

In doing these two emphasis-patterns, perhaps the solo pianist is called upon to be two (or three) people, to summon two feelings?

Making certain music, I am a duo, or a band. I'm a schizophrenic? Or in the nuanced possession of a capacity to be, or do for two.

Something similar occurs in Schubert's G-flat-Major Impromptu: