During our first months in Boston, we had each other, our home, our piano, and our four walls in the lockdown. Grocery stores shuttered so we purchased canned food from the corner store. The corner owner, white haired, blue capped, and with his face permanently obscured by a mask, shared stories about the road trips from his youth. For an instant, we imagined ourselves to…read more
After sitting at the laptop for 2 hours, I am rubbing my back and groaning. The last 2 years of indoor sitting is catching up to my back. When I complain about back pain, Jay shares exercises and stretches to try to help. Jay is a personal trainer so he never runs out of exercise advice. Jay says, “Try the exercise I showed you first,…read more
Pan is a pen name. I started using it years ago when we met and I wanted to write about him as a stranger. But now we’re married, so here I’ll refer to him by his other name, Jay. After we gather our luggage at Logan airport, we sit in the car ride to our first home. People huddle along the streets around tents outside…read more
Some days, I pace around my home or lay in bed. the lockdown didn’t help, we didn’t get a chance to meet friends in Boston. On a lot of days, there was pain in my abdomen. There was a lot of waiting by the phone for doctors or hospitals. I have been to the ER three times which is unusual for me. I’ve started playing…read more
We would meet in Toronto to get married. That was the plan. We thought it was logistical, simply signing papers, so Pan could come live with me in Boston. My sister would be one of the witnesses. Then we would have a real ceremony next year when covid is over. Though none of the scientists are predicting it to end next year. Pan called City…read more
I was one of the first to start lockdown by myself in Seattle. My workplace was the first to send people home. Home for me was in Canada, and they closed the border so I couldn’t get home. Throughout the lockdown, I didn’t leave the apartment and I didn’t touch a real person. When I told my neighbour that I wanted to jump out the…read more
It turns out that 1-4% of the population have synesthesia. Synesthesia is when one sense is linked to another, for example, if you see colour in music or letters. People with synesthesia have amazing long-term memory. It’s easy to tamper with memory when you have direct access to the senses that control memory. A while back, I noticed that one of my piano students never…read more
Everyone is teaching music online now. If you teach music online, you can get a lot more students. You can, in theory, teach at all hours of the day because your students can be from any time zone. Here are 8 tips to build a career teaching music online. 1. This means your pricing can be a lot more flexible. You are operating on the…read more
It’s the season of love! My friend Sydney and I wrote a piece about a robot falling in love, with a mix of Debussy. And I’m real excited about it! We wrote this to combine the fun of video games with the timelessness of Classical music. It’s an intermediate piano duet, so it’s perfect for pianists who like both video games and Classical! Arabesque was…read more
I love how the melody seems to slow and start again, the variation in the tempo and freedom in rhythm. For me, the beginning chords depict snowy, winter scene, not harsh, but ethereal. If we used the same chords sped up, we would find ourselves in a hectic icy winter scene.