by Francesca Leo Attending the Art of Practicing Institute’s summer program last year was a completely transformative experience. Prior to this program, I had recently graduated with my master’s degree in classical flute performance during a global pandemic, I was...

Thursday night I attended a livestream performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra, featuring the Piano Concerto in One Movement by Florence Price, a brilliant Black composer whose works were “historically erased” for decades. Written in 1934, the score of this...

My student Seth plays lead guitar in the Avett Brothers—a band that has often performed for audiences of 20,000 or 30,000 people. He came to me because he wanted to learn how to play Mozart. Seth already had experience playing the piano, and in his few months of...

“First of all,” I said, “how are you doing with this virus situation?“. The person on the other end of the phone was a customer service representative at my Internet provider company. I had no idea who she was apart from that. But I knew she was one of us. One of the...

I’ve been working hard for a few weeks to bring our new program to life—the online summer program for the Art of Practicing Institute. We knew we had to make it happen. But how could we turn this phenomenal in-person program, normally held on the beautiful green...

Last Thursday, my brother sent me an article about the coronavirus that stunned me. I canceled my plans to leave on Saturday for a meditation retreat in Vermont and am doing my retreat at home. By Friday I had asked all my students to switch to online lessons. Then...

This story describes how our anxiety about having a memory lapse in performance can be overcome by cultivating our natural coordination and our natural responsiveness to sound “I was the kid who sat at the piano for three hours playing and singing every day when I was...

This story describes one of the primary ingredients in overcoming performance anxiety: achieving a full connection with the constantly shifting human energies in a piece of music. After discovering how to let go of excess tension in his arms and play more freely and...

At a recent lesson with me on a virtuosic piece by Liszt, Evan saw that he was creating unnecessary tension in his arms by holding his elbows out. As soon as he he let them relax, he began playing with tremendous freedom, and brilliant energy leapt out of the piano....

When Brian began studying with me a couple years ago, he wanted to recover from an injury he had developed at the piano. He couldn’t do some of the things his previous teacher had asked him to do — dropping his arm directly into the keys, or hitting keys directly and...