Author Archives: James Boyk

In Part 1, we asked: Audience or no audience? For me personally, the answer is simple:

(To the tune of “Maria”) Recording! I search for a way of recording. I found an engineer, But nothing’s very clear To me! Recording! He’s got his own way of distorting. And suddenly I’ve found How dry my gorgeous sound Can be! Recording! Play it loud and it sounds like braying! But too late! It’s […]

I practiced for a concert once in a second-floor recital room at a Pennsylvania university. The room was high-ceilinged, with tall

Christmas Day, 2013: one of the three quiet days of the year, the others being

At age 70, having practiced since I was 7, performed in public from age

In practicing, if we come up short in a jump—playing an octave and a seventh when it should be two octaves—we try to correct by

My action’s too heavy, so playing’s a fight. It gives me bad dreams of both left hand and right. Are those hammers out there at the ends of the shanks?

On hold with Google, October 16, 2013, 2:30 PM: Music went from middle of a phrase of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” to

I was practicing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier I, Prélude V in my second-favorite room at

“Pianodectomy”? Piano-sectomy? -nectomy? -ectomy? What do you call the removal of the parts of yourself