The other day I was part of a coffee gathering where people from various lines of work were talking about their experiences of writing 'risk assessments'. They described the complicated forms that had to be filled in and the efforts to explain what preventive measures...
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Channel 4's series The Piano began its second series last night. It's always interesting to see the different playing styles of the pianists who put themselves forward to play a station piano in front of a crowd of listeners. Some of them play beautifully. However,...
Today is 'World Piano Day' (as if every day wasn't piano day!) and Yale University Press has been tweeting a little clip of me talking about the French pianist-composer Hélène de Montgeroult. De Montgeroult is one of the pianist-composers featured in my new book Women...
![No more bullfrogs […for now]](https://www.susantomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/IMG_20210816_155540976-rotated-1-400x250.jpg)
My readers will know that I hate people coughing in concerts. I don't mean the sudden cough that the person can't help and does their best to stifle - I mean the self-indulgent barking cough which rings out across the hall and seems to be targeted at specially quiet...
Recently I've heard or coached a number of amateur pianists whose playing I haven't heard for 18 months, or before All This started. I had been afraid that everyone's playing would have fallen apart, but actually my impression was that lockdown has enhanced rather...
Update: if you've been trying to subscribe to my blog in the last day or two and have encountered problems, please note that the link is now working properly. I've just been writing to my subscribers to tell them that new blog posts, delivered to them by email, now...
I've been watching the Euro 2020 football matches on TV - to the surprise of some of my friends. But I find that things are always interesting once you start to know a bit about them, and as there is so much coverage of the championship, it makes sense to take an...
At the weekend a bunch of us, all pianists, got together to be sociable and listen to one another play some live music. One of us had realised that the layout of her house offered the opportunity for us to obey current rules while still enjoying some piano music. Her...
My poor old piano has not been tuned for almost a year because of the lockdown. As the tuning became less delightful, I have practised 'mind over matter' - a kind of 'fingers in ears, la la la! I don't hear anything wrong' approach. In fact, my piano has held up...
A year ago, when lockdown happened and all my work was cancelled, I spent a lot of time walking around the streets of my neighbourhood - partly for exercise, partly to pass the time, and partly because we were not supposed to be taking the bus so there was no other...
It's now a whole year since concerts started being cancelled in anticipation of the pandemic. I remember very well that I had been to a birthday coffee party where the extended family sat around a big circular glass-topped table while our reflections ate scones and...
In a cheese shop the other day, conversation turned to exotic cheeses and someone mentioned Gjetost, the Norwegian goat's milk cheese which looks like a block of fudge and has a distinctive, caramel element to its taste. It's a cooked cheese made with whey and cream,...
One of our regular walks in the nearby hills takes us past a cornfield, which we discovered in the first lockdown. It was Spring then, and the field was softly green. We were thrilled to see larks emerging from their hiding-places among the rows of corn, rising up...
I keep coming across articles about the importance of revising our approach to international travel. For the sake of the environment as well as public health, we're told, we should be working towards the possibility of doing everything in the places where we live....
Last weekend, reading the Guardian Review, I was struck by a comment of Joe Moran's about having learned to play the spoons in lockdown. I was vaguely aware of spoons as musical instruments, but a bit of research put me in the picture: spoons have long been used to...