Have you ever noticed just how much music allows you to channel not just your thoughts, but your emotions as well?  No matter how you are feeling there is always a work, happy or sad, melancholy or inspiring, reassuring or upsetting, downtrodden or triumphant, whose emotions music can duplicate, while serving as an almost mirror reflection of your state of mind and heart.

As I study the works of Beethoven and have begun working a lot on some of the sonatas, I have come to realize that his compositions can be almost like the diary of a life.  Indeed, the two movements of Sonata No. 27 were to be titled Kampf zwischen Kopf und Herz ("A Contest Between Head and Heart") and Conversation mit der Geliebten ("Conversation with the Beloved"), the entire sonata being based on the romance which Prince Moritz von Lichnowsky, (to whom Beethoven dedicated the work), was having with a woman he was thinking of marrying.

The Lightbulb Moment this week for me is the realization that as a pianist I have to ask myself with every piece I study not just where the composer was in life when they wrote it, but where I am in mine as I start working on it. Why is it important to me now to study this piece? What has led me to it at this particular point? What emotional tools do I need to tap into in order to make it as meaningful as I can?

What is interesting to me about these kinds of questions is that the answers change over time.  In the beginning of my piano studies I learned things because my teachers gave them to me to learn, and I was like a blank sheet of paper where a child learns how to write the alphabet or the beginning elementary characters.

As I learned more about what the letters and characters were designed to represent however, I was able to use them to share my own thoughts as well, which is what allowed me to make the transition from playing notes to making music. This is a process that continues for an artist with every passing year, and if you’re lucky, goes on throughout life.

True art for me is never about simply playing correctly, or making sure I don’t make mistakes.  It is about approaching a work with an understanding of where the composer was in life when it was written. The list of all of Beethoven’s compositions, like those of all composers, is almost a biography of their lives told in music.  

In that same way, as I play a work over the course of many years and my understanding of it changes and grows as I do, if I am doing my job right, my playing will carry with it a sense of my own life, as well as who I am, what I am, and where I am in it.