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!

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