When music is who you are
Introducing 'Facing the Music' - the debut novel of F M Wilson (AKA The Cross-Eyed Pianist)
At the Piano with… Icarus Hines
What is your first memory of the piano?
The instrument itself rather than the music. I remember being fascinated by the mechanics of it as a very small boy: how a finger could set in motion such a complicated chain of events, all culminating in a single note. It struck me then, and still does, as one of mankind’s great inventions.
Who or what inspired you to become a teacher?
Disappointment, perhaps. Like many young musicians, I imagined the concert platform would provide all the fulfilment I could ever require. It did not. One eventually realises that performing is only one means of serving music. Teaching allows one to leave something behind in another human being, and I have come to regard that as the greater privilege.
Who were your most significant teachers?
My first teacher taught me discipline. My second taught me imagination.
The first is indispensable. The second is everything.
What do you consider the most important qualities in a musician?
Curiosity. Not merely about music, but about life itself. One cannot hope to understand music through music alone. Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin – all demand something of our humanity as well as our musicianship. Technique is acquired through work; humanity has to be lived.
What do you expect from your students?
Honesty. I do not mind mistakes, but I do mind pretence. A wrong note played with conviction tells me more than a flawless performance that has nothing to say.
What is the greatest challenge in teaching exceptionally gifted students?
Protecting them. The world is very eager to applaud talent, but considerably less interested in preserving the person who possesses it. A gifted young musician must be allowed to remain curious, to read, to fall in love, to walk in the countryside, to make mistakes. Otherwise, one risks producing a brilliant pianist and an impoverished human being.
How important is technique?
Essential, but technique is a servant, never the master.
Students often imagine they are practising scales. In reality, they are practising freedom. The better the mechanism functions, the less one has to think about it when the music begins.
How do you approach interpretation?
By asking questions rather than providing answers. Why has the composer written this harmony? Why this dynamic? Why silence here rather than another note? If a student discovers the answer for themselves, they will never forget it.
How do you deal with performance anxiety?
Preparation first, perspective second. Though I would be dishonest if I suggested either is always sufficient. Fear is not necessarily rational, and knowing that one is prepared does not always silence it. I remind my pupils that audiences do not attend concerts hoping the pianist will make mistakes. They come because they wish to be moved.
Which composers do you return to most often?
Beethoven remains inexhaustible. Every decade of one’s life reveals another Beethoven. I suspect I shall still be discovering him on my final day.
Brahms has become increasingly dear to me with age, while Debussy continually reminds us that the piano is capable of colours we scarcely imagine.
Do you think performance and teaching belong together?
Absolutely – one informs the other. A teacher who has never stood before an audience cannot fully understand the peculiar loneliness of the concert platform. Equally, a performer who never teaches risks believing music exists only for applause.
What gives you the greatest satisfaction as a teacher?
The moment a student no longer needs me. That sounds rather melancholy, but it is precisely as it should be. A teacher’s task is not to create dependence, but independence.
Do you have a favourite pupil?
No – though there are certain students whose gifts make one feel extraordinarily fortunate to have crossed their path.
What advice would you give to a young musician embarking upon a professional career?
Do not chase success. Chase truth in the music. Success, if it comes at all, is merely a by-product. And remember that there is a life beyond the keyboard. If your music is to speak honestly, it must be nourished by friendship, kindness, disappointment, literature, laughter, and love. Otherwise you will become a very accomplished pianist indeed, and have very little worth saying.
A note about Mr Hines
Sadly, you won’t find Icarus Hines listed amongst the great piano teachers of the early twentieth century. He is a fictional character from F M Wilson’s debut novel Facing the Music, in which he is the teacher and mentor of the gifted young pianist Theo Browne. His opinions, however, are entirely his own…
(Image generated by AI)
Behind the Scenes of ‘Facing the Music’ – an interview with Indie Boulevard
‘The 1913 C. Bechstein grand piano in F M Wilson’s Dorset home predates the opening of ‘Facing the Music’ by a single year, a coincidence so precise that it already belongs in fiction. Wilson has spent much of her life at the keyboard and an equally substantial part writing about the people who sit there, listening for the point where technique ends and personality takes over. Her first novel grows from years of close attention to musicians, their habits, ambitions and the identities built through daily practice.
After reviewing concerts, interviewing pianists and editing The Cross-Eyed Pianist since 2010, Wilson now claims the freedom reserved for a novelist: she decides who enters the room, which piece reaches the music stand and what follows the applause. A critic receives the finished performance, while a novelist can enter the rehearsal, interrupt it, and follow the players home. Wilson has moved from observing musicians to controlling the clock around them.
By introducing pianist Theo Browne and violinist Jonathan Lane-Fox in London in 1914, just as their careers begin and Europe edges toward war, ‘Facing the Music’ places the reader in a peculiarly painful position. Theo and Jonathan can plan their futures, while a century of hindsight has already changed the meaning of every plan. Wilson’s task is to keep their ambitions vivid under a date that has become a verdict. Published through her own Nine Barrow Press, the novel brings her years as a pianist and critic into a form where every performance can alter a life. We spoke with F M Wilson as her first novel entered the world.’
Read more:
‘Facing the Music’ is out now in paperback and eBook
Between AI and Art: The human in the arts, learning and achieving excellence
Guest post by Natalie Tsaldarakis
I came across a video of an exasperated ballet dancer talking about parents who had turned to AI to correct their children’s posture. It prompted this article, a response to the dizzying speed at which AI is infiltrating every facet of our lives. The uptake is so fast that the night before, I had been reading through people’s responses to a question about jobs they thought were safe from AI-driven redundancy. Several suggested cleaning or other manual work, apparently unaware of another post showing a robot slowly but methodically cleaning a house and neatly folding clothes. One thing is for certain: we still can’t grasp how our lives will change in the next few months and years.
Meanwhile, my path as pianist, teacher, musicologist has had a surprising turn: I am conducting a pilot study with Imperial College, on the biomechanics of elite piano performance and training, with access to resources provided by Steinway Hall and Goldsmiths College’s Deptford Town Hall. AI is not going to trail very far behind: there is 3D body imaging, motion tracking and data to analyse. In this narrower respect, AI is simply an augmentation of a computer’s abilities.
Since the advent of the internet, availability of information masks from view the more concerning shrinking of the new ‘reality’ into a colourful yet ‘flat’ experience: that of the phone, tablets and tv screens. Everything is one, or a few swipes away. In the case of a non-domain expert parent, i.e. someone who hasn’t trained in the same subject, AI can provide some background information fast, provided the right questions are asked and provided that the AI’s limitations are acknowledged. AI itself is not a ‘knowing’ entity, but a processing entity. The instigator and recipient of this knowledge is the human. A deceptive communication, which is actually cyclical: it reflects and engages with the human input in a seeming loop. So, yes, the information is available, but the context, in terms of indispensable layers such as aesthetic pursuits and creativity, is missing.
If we try to probe the matter deeper, AIs such as the general public uses, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, are actually language models. The basis of their functionality is that of predicting a probability distribution over next tokens and sampling from it to arrive at cogent and context-realistic verbal responses. And I am reminded of a very pertinent excerpt highlighting the process in humans, which connects internal thought processes with language, from Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited and with an
introduction by John B. Carroll, Foreword by Stuart Chase
The Greeks took it for granted that back of language [sic] was a universal, uncontaminated essence of reason, shared by all men, at least by all thinkers. […] Whorf flatly challenges it in his second major hypothesis. “A change in language,” he says, “can transform our appreciation of the Cosmos.”
Taken simply, internal processes of thought and experience go at least hand-in-hand with language. Although AI are language models, their output is not an interaction in the sense of having the initiative to communicate unprompted or the result of thought: the initial stimulus is the user’s thought and it is anchored in that. It could be that our over-reliance on AI ‘transforms our appreciation of the Cosmos’ in unintended ways. This is certainly
unchartered territory. What about the teacher’s concern over AI teaching movement without human supervision? Expert skill acquisition, such as required for elite ballet dancing or piano performance, is narrow and deep. The idea that anyone will do because ‘the child will not pursue seriously music’ is wrong on so many levels it requires a separate article. And I think that it is this attitude which operates in the background when parents think that AI can be a good substitute for a teacher or a sufficient supplement. The generalisations that come out of Google currently have to do both with data poverty and the fact that biomechanics, the abstraction of art to physical movement, are the necessary substrate of what we call Art, but these two cannot be equated. A good teacher is simply indispensable to instil the basics for specific outcomes to be achieved. Strategy is also not the strong point of AIs.
Teaching is an interaction, so the process is not just a passing down or the rehearsing of a physical skill, but a process within a social context. For non-expert parents, the necessary critical faculty to efficiently sift through sometimes conflicting information is lacking precisely because the requisite is not just information; it is lived experience. In her book Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos, Izabela Wagner writes about this very idea
in terms of “socialisation” in the arts: you need a human to transmit not only physical technique but also the lived experience of the milieu you are trying to become a member of.
The Arts are quintessentially the means of probing the eternal questions that torture us, to echo nineteenth century sentiments, a time when many of the canonic works of classical music were composed and are heard regularly on concert stages around the world to this day. More to the point, unlike science which seeks to prove and to know, the Arts seek to engage, no matter what the answer might be, or even when the ‘answer’ represents, like Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893), an expression that cannot be ‘answered’. It just is. Uniqueness would be the other identifier, discussed in connection to seemingly artless or mundane, now iconic, works such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962): the ability to reproduce it, underlines its emphasis away from the skill of the craft and on the effect on its unsuspecting audiences. This then supplies the third aspect of human artistic production, the intent to communicate and the decision to take action towards this direction. This is what parents of young learners miss: to develop a real relationship with the arts is to engage with socialisation which cannot be abstracted or equated to ‘interaction’ with a machine and ultimately to connect through one of the most fundamental of human needs: love, and belonging.
1 Benjamin L. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited and with
an introduction by John B. Carroll, Foreword by Stuart Chase (The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York London, 1956) Foreword, p. 8.
Natalie Tsaldarakis is a Greek concert pianist, researcher, and co-Artistic Director of the PianoPlus International Recital Series, now in its 4th edition. Her research sits at the intersection of biomechanics and piano pedagogy, currently underway in collaboration with the MSk Lab at Imperial College London, and she is completing a forthcoming Routledge publication on the pianist and pedagogue Gordon Green (1905–81). A graduate of Royal Holloway, where her teachers included Chopin scholar Prof. John Rink, she performs internationally as a member of the Ivory Duo Piano
Ensemble and Convivium Label Artist, and is a published author (Classical Music in a Changing World, eds. Kramer & Nones, Vernon Press, 2021).
New International Piano Competition launches in Weymouth, Dorset
A new piano competition for emerging professional musicians is being launched in Weymouth, Dorset, with its inaugural Final taking place on Saturday 13 February 2027.
The Weymouth International Piano Competition (WIPC) is open to pianists aged 18 to 35 and has been established to provide talented young musicians at the beginning of their professional careers with a valuable platform for performance, recognition and artistic development.
At a time when opportunities for young classical musicians are increasingly competitive, WIPC aims to offer a supportive but professionally rigorous environment in which pianists can present themselves and their chosen repertoire. Rather than prescribing a particular style or period of music, the competition places the emphasis on musical personality, communication and individuality.
Entrants will be selected for the live Final through a preliminary recorded round. The finalists will then travel to Weymouth to perform before a panel of professional musicians and a live audience on 13 February 2027.
The winner will receive a First Prize of £500. More broadly, the competition aims to give its finalists the experience and exposure that come from preparing for and taking part in a public professional event. The competition is adjudicated by renowned pianists Margaret Fingerhut and Duncan Honeybourne.
Based on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, the competition also reflects Weymouth’s growing profile as a centre for high-quality classical music-making. Its creation builds on the success of Chamber Music Weymouth, formerly Weymouth Lunchtime Chamber Concerts, which celebrates its 25th anniversary season in 2026/27 and has a long-standing commitment to presenting established performers alongside outstanding musicians of the younger generation.
The competition is hosted by Chamber Music Weymouth (formerly Weymouth Lunchtime Chamber Concerts), a popular and successful concert series founded by Duncan Honeybourne in 2002, which presents some of the best young and established artists in varied and imaginative programmes, mixing well-known works and classical favourites with lesser-known repertoire and composers. In 2026 the series was recognised with an award from Weymouth Civic Society for its continuing commitment to making high-quality live music accessible to everyone and for its contribution to arts and culture in and around Weymouth.
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 