Videos

 Here are some of my live performances as soloist and accompanist.








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2022-2023: Two Years of Music in Review

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Last year, I didn't get around to writing a post like this, so now I will be reviewing the past two years of my musical endeavors - discussing what I learned, enriching experiences I had, and what I look forward to improving upon in 2024. It was my desire to improve as a musician that led to me starting this blog, so I thought it fitting to reflect on these things. New Discoveries The past two years of have been the most musically involved for me, from discovering new composers to improving my piano technique, and giving a variety of performances. First, the composers. I present them in roughly chronological order rather than the order I discovered or "rediscovered" them. Domenico Scarlatti Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas are not new to me - I grew up hearing them (primarily on classical guitar), and they have always been a source of musical inspiration and joy. However, until the past year or so, I had only tinkered with them on the piano. In years of piano lessons, Sca...
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Beginning Beethoven

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The first page of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 1, from my beat-up Schenker edition   For a long time, I have aspired to learn and eventually perform all of Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas. I grew up hearing them and they have remained, after the keyboard works of Bach, probably the most influential works in my musical development. I think now is the time to start working on this massive undertaking in earnest. In this post, I will explain how I plan to approach this project. Background I worked on Beethoven's first sonata (Op. 2, No. 1) with my teacher David Zapka six or seven years ago, but I never manage to master its difficulties, owing partly to a lack of dedication and poor practice habits. A couple years later, I worked with him on the second sonata (Op. 2, No. 2), with essentially the same result - I got it "sort of" in my fingers, but never mastered it.      I also worked with him on No. 20 in G Major, the easiest sonata. The story of how that came ab...
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Book Review: The Well-Tempered Accompanist by Coenraad Bos

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Coenraad Bos      Coenraad Bos (1875-1955) was a Dutch pianist and vocal accompanist. In his book The Well-Tempered Accompanist, he recounts his experiences throughout his long career in music, and offers advice to aspiring accompanists. Here is the  Wikipedia biography of him, and here is a link to the book on Archive.org . The Practical and the Impractical      Overall, the practical advice on accompanying is rarely specific. Rather, Bos's emphasis is on presenting the general principles and requisite skills of accompanying. Because of this, accompanists looking for detailed and exhaustive lists of advice will be disappointed. His emphasis on the cultural background that a complete accompanist should have is perhaps what is most striking about this book. A familiarity with languages, knowledge of poetry and how to interpret it, and a basic knowledge of singing are all skills that a good accompanist must possess in addition to  (not instead of) ...
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