I woke up in total darkness early this morning and for a few moments thought I was back in my house in London. In the darkness I thought the wardrobe was on my right and the windows straight ahead at the end of the bed, as they were in London. I realised fairly...
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I have been proofreading my book about Nocturnes, which has reached the stage of being typeset. This is the point at which it starts to look like a proper book. As the author, you dare to believe that it will one day really be published and start to live in heads...
I was lying awake in the night, with music playing in my head as it usually does when I'm awake in the wee small hours. Sometimes I set the music going consciously, as for example when I'm 'practising' something I'm currently trying to learn or memorise. At other...
I'm not sure my books have ever before made it into the display at the front of a major bookstore, so it was a thrill to find Speaking the Piano just inside the main door of Blackwell's Bookshop in Edinburgh (see photo) when we were there to do some Christmas...
This Sunday morning, 14 October, ABC radio in Australia is broadcasting a substantial interview with me on 'The Music Show', presented by composer Andrew Ford. We were talking about my book 'Speaking the Piano'. The interview was recorded with me in Edinburgh and...
I was doing a radio interview the other day about my new book 'Speaking the Piano.' While waiting in the studio, I got chatting to the man on duty in reception. I was holding a copy of my book. He asked me what it was about, so I told him it was about learning music....
I was complaining last week to a fellow musician about the difficulty of getting students to reply to emails. 'You'd think they would reply to email precisely because it's so easy to click on 'reply' and write a few words', I said. 'I have exactly the same problem',...
For over a year I've enjoyed contributing weather-related photos to the Guardian newspaper via their 'Witness' site, which invited readers to send in images that captured the 'feel' of the month. Several times I've been lucky enough to have one of my photos chosen by...
One of my summer projects has been to learn all the Chopin Nocturnes. Strangely enough I have never tackled them properly, and some of them, it turns out, I hardly knew even by ear. Getting to know them has given me tremendous respect for Chopin's compositional skills...
I have been practising a lot of Schumann's music lately in preparation for various music festivals over the summer. It's always a pleasure to play Schumann and when you play a lot of different compositions, you get really into his way of thinking. His mindset feels...
Tomorrow I'm off to France to spend a week on the jury of the Lyon International Chamber Music Competition. This year the competition is for piano trio - the classic combination of piano, violin and cello. From time to time I come across people who think -very...
On a walk today I found myself passing the ice skating rink ('the coolest place in town!') where my late father was a devoted member of the skating club for about fifty years. He went every Saturday evening and every Sunday afternoon. We children tried ice skating as...
Over the last few days I have been checking the proofs of my new book, Speaking the Piano, due out in June from Boydell Press (see photo). Before we got to this point, there have been several other stages of editing. Various friends read the manuscript and gave their...
Yesterday a strange sight greeted us when we went for a Sunday morning walk on Portobello beach. At first glance we thought the beach was covered in long drifts of pinkish seaweed, extending almost the whole length of the beach. As we got closer we realised with...
Today I was at a major exhibition, 'Ages of Wonder - Scottish Art from 1540 to now' at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art in Edinburgh (it's free, and very enjoyable). As I went round, reading the plaques which explained the artworks, I was struck by how often they...