I played this piano solo a while ago. Beauty and the Beast is one of my favourite Disney movies of all time! There’s a bit of improv in this video. The piece, written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, was featured in the movie Beauty and the Beast in 1991. More recently, it has also been sung by Emma Watson in the live action film.…read more
There are a lot of mental gymnastics involved in music. Once you believe that you’ve made too many mistakes or that you are a horrible musician, you could start becoming horrible onstage. Once you believe that you’ve had no practice time or your playing has gotten worst, your playing could go downhill. Sometimes, my older students start the piano lesson describing how little time they’ve…read more
When my dad was in the hospital, he had told me about the cloud. He said, “I’m waiting for a light bulb.” “A light bulb?” “There is a cloud in my mind, over everything. I’m waiting for it to lift.” We walked around the hospital wing. There was something different about him. He smiled more, seemed to have fewer worries than I remembered. He was…read more
In elementary school, when I had started piano for a few years and sometimes learned songs from the screen of the digital piano showing me which keys to hit, I wanted to be someone who could sit down and whip off a song to impress my friends. I wanted to impress a few specific people and I wanted them to tell me that I’m good.…read more
I look up anxiety medication. They have warnings about addictions. I read about the side effects. My phone is going off from Pan’s texts and I ignore them. Maybe getting addicted to anxiety medication isn’t so bad. The allergy medication helps me sleep at night, now, except I can’t concentrate during the day, that’s all. I also look up sensory integration disorder. It was sent…read more
When I was having a jaw surgery, I heard this song on my spotify list and sat down at the piano to play a few seconds of it. And a few more seconds. Pop piano music is catchy, after all. Charlie Puth is a singer-songwriter who first found success on Youtube via viral videos. His other popular songs include “See you again,” “One Call Away,”…read more
When I had a friend take me to the hospital, I said, “If we have to pay for parking, I’ll pay.” “No,” she said, “we don’t have to pay. I’m worried that you won’t be able to breathe so we should get there fast.” When her car slows at the entrance, she’s looking at the front windshield and says, “Well, Grace, this is as far…read more
for the first few months moving to a new country sucked so I was always thinking of leaving. but then I was at a point where things were good here and so I was ok with staying but then I didn’t know what to do because i was unhappy with the apartment. at first i thought i was unhappy because i didn’t have a piano.…read more
My back was hurting and after being in bed sick for two days, I wanted a massage. I wanted the most painful type of massage a person can get, one of those deep tissue ones. My piano bench might be too high because my back always hurts after I play. I was calling around to see which clinics would book me in a deep tissue…read more
If you repeatedly play a passage the wrong way during piano practice, you are tacking on dead weight. Each time you do it, you are solidifying a mistake you make and it is that much harder to change it down the road. You will get a different answer about how muscle memory works depending if you ask a neurologist or a biologist, but the consensus…read more