A Delicate Balance: At—and Away From—the Keyboard (June 12, 2025)

From left to right: Lychees for breakfast; greeting Tamino before practice; a thoughtful listener; the poet Robert Browning

My life as an aspiring artist is never easy—or simple.  By that I mean that everyday there are choices to be made in terms of how to spend my time, and what is needed to take my goal of a career to the next step. What repertoire should I be studying? What aspects of my technique need to be improved?  When have I practiced enough? When am I practicing too much?  How much are my efforts to have a career paying me in terms of personal satisfaction and self-fulfillment? And perhaps, just as important, how much is all of this costing me, emotionally, spiritually, physically, and psychologically?

These are never easy questions to answer, but they must be asked and answered almost every day.

After a breakfast of lychee nuts and practicing the basics of technique on my keyboard at home, I headed to Mr. Cosmo's apartment. As usual, he kindly made me an espresso, and while drinking it, we talked about the work that pianists do at the piano and the work they do outside the piano room.

I enjoy a lot of things other than piano, such as shopping, makeup, fashion, going to see paintings, going to see operas and orchestras, and getting absorbed in reading books. But sometimes I worry about whether it's okay to cut down on my piano practice time so much. When I consulted Mr. Cosmo about it, he gave me a very clear answer: The only way to get better is to practice.

There is a delicate balance involved in the life of a musician however, and what I discover is that one has to decide to work not to become perfect, but always and constantly become better. Every rehearsal, every performance, every practice session creates an opportunity to be better than the last one because the process is one whereby one is always learning from life and surroundings, and being changed as a person because of daily influences. 

Living life on a daily basis, for a pianist however, means taking those lessons and bringing them back to the keyboard so that you are enriching both your understanding of a work and your interpretation of it. One balances an awareness of life with a desire to take what one has learned and put it into the music.

The time away from the keyboard is meant to teach lessons that take you right back to it. Balance is achieved when the lessons of life are ones you want to put right back into the music. The goal then is not perfection, but living life in such a way that you are creating more and more opportunities to become a better version of yourself through personal experience, and then using those experiences to play with new awareness, fresh eyes, a broadened spirit, and an expanded range of ideas.

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”  So said Robert Browning.

It’s also how I live my life at the keyboard, and away from it—always working to expand my reach.