David Simon, the creator of The Wire, once described being incredulous that HBO had been willing to greenlight the gritty television dramas that would pave the way for his own. In his words: “They’re going to put that on TV?”

Looking back on the experience of piano lessons across the spectrum of my childhood, I see a similar incredulity in the way I felt when teachers would give repertoire to me: “They’re going to let me play that?” Maybe I’m just built this way, but it felt like someone was allowing me to be doing something I shouldn’t—so, as a kid, I felt tremendous pressure to live up to the pieces on my plate, pressure to show other people what I had been granted permission, probably by mistake, to access. “Tell Mrs. Long what you’re working on,” my mother prompted me once, when we ran into an old friend. This is the one that will prove you’re good at this.

It's a terrible feeling.

It’s also a terrible way to try to be a musician. When music is a stand-in for authority, or approval, or easiness or difficulty, or achievement, all of those forces can crush the actual pathways of creative expression. They make it very difficult to enjoy playing, and, ironically, they also make it very difficult to play well. If you’re always thinking of music as monolithic, like, “the Gershwin,” “the Mozart,” or “the Mendelssohn,” it’s easy to miss and hard to appreciate the small, ordinary, even annoying details and choices that make it up. I’m quite sure that, in my tween and teen performances of the works on the first half of this program, I was missing a lot of nuance. I return to these pieces now to see, with curiosity and without judgment, what I missed.




In high school, I was in the pit orchestra of Anything Goes. I had no experience with ensemble playing, no time or support for understanding or acquiring the foundational skills any collaborative pianist would have needed to make it work. Rock solid internal sense of pulse, intellectual and technical facility with harmony, ability to navigate the chord-reliant style that gives a rhythmic framework to other players, listening across parts—I was in no way equipped. But “You’re going to love this,” my dad had said. Right. I was supposed to love it. It was supposed to be American jazz fun. I was supposed to be able to play. I had been given the part. The whole enterprise was so overburdened and stressful that it’s no wonder it imploded, with the conductor hiring someone to bail me out of the numbers I couldn’t handle. It left me with an aftertaste of shame that lasted through the time, decades later, when I found myself performing through repetitive stress injury and major depression because I didn’t want to be ill-prepared and fail, again, in “the Brahms piano quartet.”



Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Being a pianist doesn’t have to be like this.

It can feel good.

How does that happen? It’s my privilege to be figuring it out forever; and the pieces on the second half of the program are encounters with what happens when playing feels good. In the case of Bach’s English Suite in D minor and Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” I’ve loved and admired these compositions for a long time, but in coming to them at the age of 42, I felt—almost for the first time—a true freedom of choice. The pieces seemed possible, so I approached them. Let’s see how this could work. That’s it.

Missy Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine” is a piece written in 2022 for my mentor, Adam Tendler, an artist who has coached and is still coaching me through much of this crazy journey of being a grownup at the instrument, and the chapters of life it has comprised. The injury chapter, the depressive diagnosis chapter, the becoming a parent chapter, which are all there, always. He commissioned “Forgiveness Machine” with an unexpected inheritance from his father, and once wrote that, together with other commissions that stemmed from the same inheritance, those works felt like bereavement gifts from friends. It is from the open channels of sadness and care that I, too, want to play it as a gift, for anyone who might need it.

“Pretend you’re a pianist,” Adam suggested to me recently. And I understood. It wasn’t a hall pass, a temporary access code to something that should usually be off limits. It was the idea that, if you start from a position of neutrality, when the pieces aren’t bigger or more important than you, when they don’t have to signify anything more than what they are, when you’re already a pianist, there is a potentially beautiful range to be found in experimenting, even inhabiting the choices of others. After all, you can always come back.

You can come home again.