The Fun of Discipline
Following my concert at Columbus Citizens Foundation, I played a few measures of the last movement of the Beethoven Moonlight Sonata with fellow pianist Yannie Tan.
Please take a look at the video in this post. If you would, look at it more than once.
What do you see? On the one hand you should see Yannie Tan and me performing a bit of Beethoven.
On the other, you should see two pianists having fun.
When you consider that between the two of us Yanni and I have probably been studying the piano for more than thirty years—perfecting technique, learning repertoire, and performing—the most important lesson this video has to teach is that neither of us ever stopped learning how to have fun. The years of study and hard work are both important and necessary, but they should never be carried out without a great deal of enjoyment along the way.
Playing the piano requires incredible discipline, but with that discipline also comes a lot of freedom. Freedom to try out new things; freedom to explore every nuance of a work because of having the skill and flexibility to do so. Freedom to break apart a work and put it back together again in the same way a skilled mechanic can do with an engine, because of fully understanding how every part works in relationship to the other. Freedom to create a musical portrait the same way a great painter can do on canvas because she has spent years mastering the discipline required to make the paint flow exactly as she wants with every stroke, so that the end result travels a direct line from eye to mind to hand, always by way of the heart.
This is not just a video about Beethoven, or the Moonlight Sonata, or even Yannie and me deciding what is an appropriate tempo, as we do just before we begin to play. It is instead a video about a confidence we have as pianists and musicians that comes from having done the many years of hard work required to build the type of discipline that allows us to channel all of our thoughts into the keyboard, and all while having fun doing it.
As I work more and more on my career I discover that all of life is like that. Whether it is the world of sports, engineering, music, the arts, or even playing video games, the real fun comes once you have developed the discipline need to play by, and within, the rules. To work within a particular set of established principles and fundamentals so that what you have to say can be expressed fully and completely within an accepted and established framework.
Music for me has always been, and will always be, like that. Discipline, study, practice, and hard work do not trap me, but instead become part of an unspoken bargain where I give over to non-stop learning and a commitment to do all that it takes to be my very best.
In return, I have the honor, privilege and freedom of being able to, through my playing, celebrate the music, the composer, and the joy that comes with knowing that discipline allows me to accept all of the challenges a work presents, because I have developed the skills needed to carry out everything a work demands.
Are the skills created through discipline firmly within your grasp? Great. Now get to the piano and have some fun!
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