Taken from the old website. Original post date: June 19, 2005

I’ll start with an old Jewish joke:
A man was walking in the mountains just enjoying the scenery when he stepped too close to the edge of the mountain and started to fall. In desperation he reached out and grabbed a limb of a gnarly old tree hanging onto the side of the cliff. Full of fear he assessed his situation.

He was about 100 feet down a shear cliff and about 900 feet from the floor of the canyon below. If he should slip again he’d plummet to his death. Full of fear, he cries out, “Is there anyone up there who can help me?” But there was no answer. Again and again he cried out but to no avail. Then suddenly a deep voice replied, “Yes, I can help you.”
“Who is it?”
“This is the Lord.”
“Can you help me?”
“Yes I can help you.”
“Help me!”
“Just let go and trust.”
Looking around the man became full of panic. “What?!?!”
“Let go. I will catch you.”
“Uh…Is there anyone else up there that can help me?”

Let me give you an example of something I discovered many years ago regarding the power of letting go and taking risks. Normally, I would always practice a piece of music with a certain conception of how it should sound, and then I would run it through a thousand times until it felt solid and ready to call the piano movers.

Then of course, there was always the ‘stereotypical warm-up’ which had to precede each session of ‘so-called music-making’. Well, I can’t say the system is terribly flawed; It will definitely work but the results have always turned out to be mediocre, nothing like the level of the great pianists of our time.

Now instead of this procedure, I decided to take on an entirely different approach. I decided to not practice at all for six months before a concert tour I was scheduled to have. Previously, if I ever took a break and returned to the piano I would jump into hysteria, and panache over how unprepared I am. Very soon the mind would erupt into an avalanche of negative thoughts which lead to extreme tension, fatigue and even injury. Instead, I decided to relax and embrace this unpreparedness of my piano technique. I got myself to enjoy just how distorted each piece sounded from its very first notes, compared to how it sounded before my huge break.

After a couple of hours of doing this I noticed that the notes began to fall into their proper place. It almost felt like magic. According to Leon Fleisher, one of the great pianists of our time, each beat in a piece of music has a ‘sweet-spot’, which makes the rhythm feel natural to the listener. A metronome cannot provide this ideal pulse, it must come from within ourselves. It was truly a magnificent experience to create such beautiful music and to realize that everything was in fact a distortion!

I must make an important point here. During those six months of not practicing I was not lying at the beach all day long – although I’m not completely ruling out this possibility for a future experiment – instead I was reading many great works of literature and philosophy, and listening to many older recordings of great pianists.

To sum up this six month experience, I would say that I was intensively augmenting my ‘curiosity’ by continuously asking myself why some performances become great while others do not reach our soul. I was not looking for answers, and obliterated any expectations that I would find them. Still today, I really don’t want any answers – only more risks!