Respect is a crucial part of teaching – mutual respect between teacher and pupil, and also between teacher and parent/the person paying the teacher’s fees. From my side of the bargain, respect towards my students and their parents includes:

Oblique Strategies (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) is a deck of 7 by 9 centimetres (2.8 in × 3.5 in) printed cards in a black container box, created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt and first published in 1975.

A busy professional pianist will need to have several programmes of music “in the fingers” at any given time, which can be made ready for some kind of performance at any given time. Alongside that there is new repertoire to

Practising is a habit. If we are serious about our music, our progress with our repertoire and our technical and artistic development, we need to establish good and regular practising habits, as regular as cleaning one’s teeth. No one, not

The accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works– Edward Said, ‘On Late Style’ What is ‘Late Style’? It’s a question that has preoccupied writers and thinkers, from Theodor Adorno, who coined the

The title of this post is a quote from an interview with pianist Gabriela Montero. Story-telling is about conveying a message and music is of course all about conveying messages, telling stories and stimulating the imagination, of listener and performer.

Please don’t shoot at the pianist; he’s doing his best(attributed to Oscar Wilde) I sometimes get the feeling people think musicians are invincible… We engage in a highly complex, technical and artistic activity which requires huge physical and mental agility

In the nineteenth century Franz Liszt probably did more than any other composer for the genre of the piano transcription. His transcriptions and paraphrases made an important contribution to the development of piano music, with their technical challenges, innovative notation,