Skip to main content

My Would-Be Acceptance Speech

Yesterday at the PWJ Annual Holiday Awards, I was honored to be one of the Classical Performance Award winners! As you can see in the video below, I got it for my Liszt "practice video" that I posted earlier this year.

While I was happy to get the award, it felt a little ironic, considering my decision to move away from classical music—and learning written scores in general—and more toward writing and arranging. But then I thought it was a fitting (and affirming) end to this very long era of my life.

As this was a fun online event yesterday, no one made acceptance speeches. But if I'd made one, it would have gone something like this.

The Would-Be Speech

Thank you so much, everyone! I am genuinely honored (and honestly a little surprised) to receive this award for Liszt's Liebestraum No. 3. I poured my heart and soul into learning and mastering that piece this year, and it's so nice to be recognized. Thank you to Jonny and the PWJ team—and to this community for all the encouragement along the way.

What makes this award especially meaningful is that it feels like a fitting last hurrah for a long chapter of my piano life.

In Billy Joel’s documentary And So It Goes, he talks about not wanting to “read the dots”—not because he couldn’t, but because what he really loved was hearing music, creating music, and making it come alive at the piano. I’ve spent many years (on and off) doing the dots part: learning, polishing, and interpreting what’s written on the page. I’m grateful for that foundation, and I poured more hours than I’d like to admit into Liebestraum.

But if I’m honest, I’ve always felt most at home with music that works—music that makes people stop to listen, tap their feet, smile. Music that draws out emotion and resonates. Music that can make you cry. Even when I was playing classical repertoire, that was often the instinct underneath it.

Lately, I’ve felt ready to lean fully into that instinct: re-developing my ear, improvising, arranging, writing, and understanding music from the inside out—not as a retreat from classical technique or music reading, but as a way of finally using my skills for the things I love most about the piano. The styles that have always lit me up most are ragtime, blues, and gospel. I love taking tunes I love and using those styles to make them mine. And thanks to the PWJ courses and this community, I feel more equipped to do that now than ever.

So receiving a classical award for what may be my final big “dot piece” feels oddly perfect—not as an ending, but as a punctuation mark before moving fully into the kind of music-making that feels most like home. Most like me.

I’m deeply grateful for this community and excited for what’s next for all of us in 2026!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing Practice Tracker 2.0: Leveling Up My Piano Game

(Apologies for the cheesy clip art. I needed to come up with something, or the Blogger template would show a fuzzy, overly-enlarged snippet of the first chart below.) When I showed my husband my piano practice tracker, he said I should market and sell it. Ha. It’s not for sale, but I’m excited to share how this tool has transformed my practice—and why it might inspire all three of my readers. Since my last post about the Amazing Practice Tracker, I’ve made it even better. Here’s a peek at how it works, using my June data. All The Pretty Colors, All the Pretty Winners My tracker now sparkles with color: darker shades for active pieces, lighter ones for maintenance, technique, and sight-reading. Each day, the piece I practice most gets a bright yellow highlight—a little “gold medal,” if you will. (Click image for a slightly larger view.) A leaderboard automatically shows the day’s top piece and time. And if that isn't enough, I keep track of the month's leaders--specifically, ho...
1 comment
Read more

The Rusty Lock and Key

I'm in a room. There's a door in front of me. On the other side of that door is a whole world of adventure and imagination and joy and delight, but for the moment, I'm locked in this gray little room. The door itself has a lock that is all rusted. I've tried to open it in the past, but I've never gotten very far. Sometimes I try to scrape the rust off the lock. I also have a rusty old key that I occasionally try to polish. Each time, after I've made a little progress, I'll put it into the keyhole in hopes of opening the door. It turns a half a millimeter or so, but the brief excitement at my progress dies quickly when I realize, once again, the lock isn't opening. I set the old key aside, and from there I can forget about the door, the lock, and the world outside, for months—years, even. But then something happens—I hear birdsong, or I catch a glimpse of color—and I pick up the key and start picking away at the stubborn rust. That dark little room is my ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dance of the Digits

Note: I've expanded significantly on this post over at my other blog, A Sort of Notebook . I am loving Liszt. I love the way my hands have to "share" the melody. I have so much to write on that, but I'm borrowing a computer and don't have enough time to do it justice. Suffice it to say that I've practiced three and a half wonderful hours today, and about two hours on Liszt alone. What I find wonderful about Liszt is that it pushes one hand hard, but not too hard. Then the other hand gets a turn to be pushed. But it's never both at the same time, and never one hand for too long. It's hard to explain. When I have more time to write, I'll word things rather more eloquently, I'm sure. All I can say now is that my fingers feel like they're dancing a wonderful, graceful dance. I've been trying to "play with my body," as my piano teacher says to do, so all of me is dancing. And Standchen, though it still need a lot of work (like, um...
3 comments
Read more