The PianoWell Journal
A collection of essays exploring the invisible processes behind piano playing, musical thought, and artistic development.
Two pianists can play the same phrase with the same dynamics and articulation, yet only one sounds as though the instrument is singing. The difference may lie in the inaudible journey between the notes.
Two hands may trace the same visible path while learning two entirely different things. Perhaps technique is not only the movement we can see, but what that movement is responding to.
Piano technique is still treated as a problem of the fingers, wrist and arm. But what if movement begins earlier—in what the pianist can hear inwardly?
Why the performance we care about most may need to be the last in a series of earlier performance cycles.
Artistic identity, borrowed expectations, and the strange possibility of mastering the wrong image of who you should be.
Relaxation is usually taught as something to do. Yet if a pianist knew how to be relaxed while playing, the tension would not be there — which suggests the wrist may be the last place to look.
Visuotonal modality transfer, notational audiation, and the hidden step between notation and performance.
Anauralia, musical imagery, and the possibility of becoming a highly trained musician without a vivid inner ear.
Science can test an imagined pitch. But what happens when the inner musical image contains harmony, timbre, voicing, movement — and an entire score?
Musical imagery, covert singing, subvocalization, and the hidden role of movement — what happens physically when musicians hear music in the mind.
We treat expression as something we add to music. But perhaps it has two beginnings — one built with painstaking care, and one that becomes possible only when we stop controlling it and start to listen.
Athletes rehearse movement in their minds before performing. Pianists can too—but the decisive question is not whether we imagine movement, but what kind of movement we are imagining.
We are taught that technique begins at the keyboard. Yet the first movement is born much earlier—in the hand that instinctively follows a sung phrase, long before a single key is touched.
Two pianists can play the same phrase with the same dynamics and articulation, yet only one sounds as if the instrument is singing. The difference may not be in the fingers, nor even in the sound—but in what happens between two notes.
We polish each note as though it were complete in itself. But a single sound says almost nothing—its meaning lives in where it is going. A reflection on the invisible thread between notes, and why the most important note may be the one that is never heard on its own.
To an observer, two pianists may play exactly the same notes—yet one seems to lead the music while the other is always catching up. The difference is invisible: great performers hear the next note, in full colour and direction, before their fingers ever move.
Silent practice is often described as a substitute for the instrument. But the deeper truth is a conversation: imagination gives the hand direction, and the keyboard, in turn, teaches the imagination what movement really feels like.
I already knew how to hear music inwardly before playing. What I had not understood was how subtle tension in the hands could prevent that imagined sound from reaching the piano.
The mind's ear is not a rare gift but a trainable skill—and training it may have less to do with sharpening imagination than with refining attention.
Why hearing the right pitches is only the beginning of the inner musical experience.
From Audiation and Inner Hearing to Complete Musical Representation
We tend to treat technical difficulties as problems of the body. But what if the stiff wrist, the weak finger, the excess effort are all the body’s attempt to replace a musical experience that has not yet happened internally?
We are taught to train the fingers first. But what if movement is the very last step in playing — and everything that makes it effortless happens long before a key is ever touched?
