How I Returned to the Piano After Focal Hand Dystonia

I had been playing the piano intensively since childhood. By the age of six, I was studying at the Central Music School of the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory. My training eventually included twenty years within the Russian School and a Master’s degree from the Moscow Conservatory.

Behind the performances, however, there had always been difficulty.

Much of my earlier training had been built on physical repetition, and learning new repertoire required enormous effort. Long before the symptoms appeared, I had already begun searching for another relationship between musical thought and movement. Yet technical uncertainty, pressure and residual tension still remained part of my playing.

At twenty-four, during my conservatory studies, I began noticing unfamiliar sensations in both hands: tingling and electrical spasms travelling through the elbow, wrist and little finger. My fourth and fifth fingers curled inward and stopped responding normally. I also began losing coordination in my thumb.

The symptoms eventually affected more than piano playing. I struggled to write, type or even press a number on a telephone.

Rest, medication and massage did not resolve the problem. Diagnostic procedures later confirmed focal hand dystonia.

For several years, I stayed away from the piano.

The central ideas behind my work were already developing many years before the dystonia appeared.

I understood that technique could not be organised by the hands alone. The sound had to exist inwardly first, movement had to respond to musical direction, and physical action had to serve an intention that was already present.

But this relationship was not yet complete. I was still refining details of wrist and elbow motion. More importantly, I had not fully understood how even subtle compulsive tension in the hands could interrupt everything that came before it.

The musical intention was present.
The hands were not yet a clear, open channel through which it could reach the piano.

During the years in which I was away from the piano, prayer to Jesus became a central part of my life.

I spent time in churches—first in Florida and later in Singapore—where people listened to me, prayed with me, sang with me and welcomed me into supportive communities. After many years in which music had become associated with pressure, fear of failure and rejection, I encountered something very different: belonging, acceptance, love and the freedom to be present without having to prove myself.

I do not present prayer or participation in church as a medical treatment for focal dystonia, and I cannot measure precisely what part these experiences played in the changes that followed.

But in my lived experience, faith and supportive community transformed the emotional conditions in which I approached music. Piano playing no longer had to begin with fear, correction or the demand to succeed. It could begin with prayer, gratitude and a sense of being held by something larger than myself.

This is why devotional and gospel music became such a natural path back to the instrument. It was not simply easier or non-classical repertoire. It belonged to this new world of faith, community and emotional safety.

I was not returning to the piano in order to prove that I could still play.
I was returning through prayer, gratitude and music offered to God.

When I returned to the piano in 2013, the music through which I began was inseparable from this period of faith and community.

I deliberately set classical repertoire aside. I began with simple devotional and gospel music, together with music from animations. This music carried no history of conservatory examinations, difficult technical passages, judgement or failure.

It belonged to another emotional world.

At first, I could play for only about fifteen seconds without the old sensations appearing. But those fifteen seconds mattered. They allowed me to experience contact with the keyboard without immediately entering the physical and emotional state in which the dystonia had developed.

Before and after playing, I prayed to Jesus and expressed gratitude. I approached the instrument gently, without demanding a result from my hands.

Gradually, piano playing began to contain different sensations:

• peace rather than anticipation of failure;
• curiosity rather than constant correction;
• musical intention rather than physical control;
• and enjoyment rather than fear.

The duration of the sessions increased slowly. The importance of this period was not the complexity of the music. It was the creation of a different relationship with the instrument.

Returning immediately to old repertoire would have meant returning to music already filled with physical, aural and emotional memories.

Instead, when I eventually returned to classical music, I learned completely new pieces.

I did not begin by asking:

Can I still play the repertoire that once caused difficulty?

I allowed new music to become associated with the inner process I had already developed, the newly learned sensation of loose hands, and a calmer physical and emotional relationship with the instrument.

The transition happened within only a few months.

After nearly five years in which I had barely touched the piano, I could initially play for only about fifteen seconds without the old sensations returning. I then spent several months playing slow devotional and gospel music, together with music from animations—music that carried none of my former classical associations.

By November 2013, only a few months after beginning again, I had started my YouTube channel and begun documenting my return.

What followed was not a cautious progression through easier classical pieces. I moved directly into some of the most technically demanding repertoire I had ever attempted. I learned entirely new works from scratch—including Chopin Études, Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, and Rachmaninoff’s G-minor Prelude.

Several of these performances were recorded after only seven to fourteen days of practice.

1. Nearly five years with almost no piano.
2. Fifteen seconds at the keyboard.
3. Several months of slow, unfamiliar, non-classical music.
4. Then some of the most demanding works I had ever attempted.

The purpose was never to prove how quickly I could learn. The change in learning time revealed something more important: what had already been organised inwardly could now pass through the hands with far less interference.

And the feeling of completing these pieces was not primarily one of technical achievement.

It was triumph, relief and perhaps the deepest gratitude I had ever experienced.

After believing that I might never play again, every completed recording showed me that the connection between musical intention, free movement and the piano was becoming possible again.

Focal dystonia does not have one identical history or expression in every person.

Another pianist may have different symptoms, triggers, medical circumstances, musical associations and emotional experiences. For that reason, I cannot promise that another person will have the same outcome.

The current programme presents the mature form of work that began many years before the dystonia and continued to develop during recovery and through subsequent teaching. It examines:

• how written notation becomes internally heard sound;
• how imagined sound acquires quality and direction;
• how that direction is connected with movement;
• how inner singing connects the space between notes;
• how touch and arm weight become part of the same musical intention;
• and how these relationships can gradually become integrated.

These relationships were not all created as a response to focal dystonia. Recovery clarified several elements that had remained incomplete—above all, the role of genuinely loose hands and certain details of wrist and elbow motion.

This work can accompany appropriate medical care. It is not a substitute for neurological diagnosis or treatment.

My question was no longer:

How can I force my hand to play normally again?

It became:

Can the musical process I already understand reach the keyboard through hands that no longer block it—and can piano playing become a different physical and emotional experience?

For me, that question opened a way back.

Recovery did not begin with a difficult piece, a corrected finger or a test of what my hand could still do.

It began with fifteen seconds of unfamiliar music—and a new sensation: the music I already heard inwardly could pass through loose hands into the keys without reproducing the old response.