From an early age, I found joy in making music and desired to spend my life doing it. That desire came entirely from inside of me. Similarly, one thing I love about teaching piano adults is that they too, in my experience, only take lessons for personal reasons. As I …

The summer I was twelve, I started taking piano lessons with Gail. Gail lived a few miles from our home in Concord, California. When I met Gail, she had some kind of medical problem with her throat. She told me she had to speak more softly than usual. This translated …

The notion of “talent” often confuses or discourages piano learners. Talent is the idea of God-given advantages, the kind that seem to exist for four year old children who play Mozart sonatas at the piano like virtuosos. Common knowledge suggests that people who achieve greatness were fated to become that …