I have a new book, Speaking the Piano, due out in June from Boydell Press.

My previous four books are about performance. This new one is about my experiences of learning and teaching (though performance sneaks in too). The title was inspired by a remark of Artur Schnabel’s teacher, Leschetitzky, to the effect that he ‘must learn to speak the piano’.

‘Speaking the Piano’ is not a tutor book or a method, but I describe the approaches of some of the fascinating teachers I’ve studied with, and I also talk about some of my own experiences when teaching.

Why write such a book? The idea came to me when reading about the struggle of music educators to keep music on the national agenda. Many children now don’t have the opportunity to study music to any depth. Sometimes they have problems obtaining instruments, which can be expensive. In some areas, instrumental lessons are only available as a costly add-on. Music has been downgraded on the curriculum in many schools and as time goes by, the effects feed through. Friends who run choirs and orchestras at college level and above have described the increasing difficulty of recruiting young musicians with enough expertise and practice in sight-reading to be able to tackle great repertoire on little rehearsal. It often strikes me that the kind of music I love best can only be played if there are enough people with the instrumental skills required. What if the skills are allowed to fade away?

I started to think of the interesting lessons I’ve had, in different countries and across different genres from classical to jazz. Taken together they seem to point up the value of in-depth study. Certainly I would not have been able to develop high-level performing skill without access to those ingenious teachers with their insistence on the importance of music and their focus on what it means and how to communicate it. I decided to set down some of my recollections, of teaching and of being taught.