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OK by me – A life in Encores

Steven Osborne, piano

Pianist Steven Osborne’s latest release, OK by me – A life in encores, is far more than a collection of attractive miniatures brought together by a distinguished pianist with a large catalogue of acclaimed recordings. Rather, it is a musical autobiography, a highly personal selection of pieces that have accompanied Osborne throughout his life as a pianist, student, colleague, husband, teacher and listener.

Osborne himself describes the album as creating “a line through my musical life”, and his unusually extensive and candid liner notes are integral to understanding the recording. The repertoire is delightfully eclectic: Bach and Grieg sit alongside Rachmaninov, Schumann, Prokofiev and Poulenc, while Keith Jarrett, Meredith Monk and Joni Mitchell rub shoulders with Peter Maxwell Davies and James Clapperton. There are also Osborne’s own arrangements and improvisations, and the album opens with his own OK by me, a simple melody that emerged, apparently fully formed, while improvising.

The real thread running through the album is not repertoire but memory. Liadov’s delicate A Musical Snuffbox recalls his mother’s musical jewellery box and its twirling ballerina; Bach’s Sheep may safely graze evokes childhood evenings spent listening to his parents play piano duets; Grieg’s Butterfly belongs to his earliest repertoire and to childhood performances. Later pieces carry other associations: Poulenc’s Novelettes are bound up with the chance encounter that led to Osborne’s long relationship with Wigmore Hall, while his arrangement of Schumann’s Widmung is associated with his wife, Jeannie, for whom he played it as an encore on their first wedding anniversary.

OK by me explores something more interesting than the conventional idea of the encore as a charming musical afterthought. These pieces become repositories of experience and memory. Hearing or playing them can collapse time, reconnecting the adult musician with the child reaching up to the family piano, the student discovering new repertoire and new ways of thinking about music, or the performer encountering colleagues and teachers whose ideas have subtly altered his own.

There is another, deeper narrative here too: the evolution of a musician. Osborne writes revealingly about moving away from a youthful concern with getting things “right” towards something freer and more instinctive – what he describes as a movement “from perfectionism to engagement”. Improvisation played an important part in that change, teaching him to experience music not as something fixed but as something that unfolds in real time, “moment by moment”.

Perhaps most interesting of all is Osborne’s discussion of what it means to communicate through music. For him, interpretation ultimately depends on finding personal meaning in the music and on having the confidence to trust one’s own response to it. As a teacher, he values “honest immaturity far above fake profundity”, encouraging young musicians to discover what a piece actually feels like to them rather than reproducing received ideas about how it ought to go.

That desire for honesty seems to lie at the heart of this deeply personal album. Osborne admits that introspection is his “natural territory” and that he particularly values the communion with an audience which intimate music can create. So this is not really an album about encores at all: it is about the music we carry with us, the people, experiences and memories attached to it, and the way our relationship with certain pieces changes as we ourselves change. Above all, it is about music as connection – between performer and listener, certainly, but also between our present and former selves.

As Osborne observes towards the end of his notes, at its most powerful, music can meet some of our deepest needs: “for safety, for connection, for stories, for transcendence”. OK by me feels like a particularly generous expression of that idea: a pianist opening his musical memory box and inviting us to listen.

And as one would expect from a pianist of Osborne’s pedigree, each piece on this strikingly original album is beautifully presented, with fine attention to detail in dynamics, musical colour, texture, melody, character, and so much more within pieces which last only a few minutes in most cases. There’s great delicacy and tenderness in some of the pieces – for me, Osborne’s arrangements of Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You and Keith Jarrett’s My Song are particular gems. Gershwin’s Three Preludes combine upbeat rhythmic vitality in the first and third with a more introspective, almost brooding atmosphere in the second. There are many delights here to suit all tastes, and as a pianist myself, I find myself wanting to explore more miniatures like these, rather than wrestling with middle-period Beethoven or one of Schubert’s late sonatas! A very personal treasure trove of musical gems, Osborne has, in his own words, “allowed the orders to diverge”, so there is no coherent track order; the pieces simply lead on from one another. Thus, it becomes an album which can be dipped into or listened to as a whole, depending on one’s mood or the time of day.

Listening to OK by me, and reading Steven Osborne’s unusually candid accompanying liner notes, I was struck by how closely many of his reflections chimed with ideas I had been exploring while writing my novel Facing the Music. At its heart, the novel asks what it means to be a musician, and what happens when the identity one has built around music is challenged or disrupted. Osborne writes about performance anxiety, injury, perfectionism, honesty in performance, teachers and colleagues, and the gradual evolution of his own musical identity; but he also writes about something I have long felt very strongly myself – the way music becomes bound up with memory. Certain pieces carry people, places and experiences within them, so that hearing or playing them years later can collapse the distance between past and present. In Facing the Music I explored that idea through fiction; in OK by me, Osborne offers something more intimate and real: the story of a musical life told through the music which has accompanied it.

OK by Me – A Life in Encores is released on the Hyperion label on 13 November 2026

(Artist images: Ben Ealovega)

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Paulina Derbez is the author of The Invisible Force of Music

What prompted you to write The Invisible Force of Music, and what do you mean by the “invisible force” in the title?

My first book, The Conscious Musician (El Músico Consciente), was published in 2013. Until then, I had worked exclusively with children. However, beginning in 2015, I started working with post-secondary students and I witnessed the significant impact that The Conscious Musician methodology had on their daily practice and stage performance. With each student, I began to notice a change in their relationship with their instrument and with music. Their physical and mental tension began to decrease, making their daily practice more effective and enjoyable and their on-stage performance more liberating. Because of this discovery, in 2017 I decided to pursue a master’s degree in music pedagogy at the Escola Superior de Música in Barcelona. In 2020, I felt the need to write a new book in which I could share The Conscious Musician methodology and its impact on post-secondary students, as well as its psychological and pedagogical foundations.

I firmly believe that music arises from an invisible force that extends beyond our senses. To truly transform the way we perceive the world of sound, I believe it is important for us as artists to connect with that force and to see ourselves as channels through which music can fulfill its mission: to touch the listener’s heart. In this way, a concert can transcend mere entertainment to become an experience of transformation for both the performer and the audience. This is why I believe it is essential to create harmony between our musical intentions, our conscious emotions, and our bodily awareness in every practice session and every performance. In this way we can connect with that invisible force in every music practice and every onstage performance.

You argue for a balance between mind, body, and emotion in music-making. Why do you think these elements have sometimes been neglected in traditional musical training?

Throughout my career as a teacher, I have noticed that the behaviorist teaching philosophy still prevails in music pedagogy. In other words, teachers simply tell students what they should correct without taking the students’ capacity for reflection and metacognition into account. Teachers often think of their students as mere receptacles of information. More generally, there is a tendency to focus on correcting every problem at a purely technical level, without recognizing that each student is an integrated person with metacognitive, expressive, and bodily capacities. The failure to address the whole student can result in physical tension, performance anxiety, and a debilitating fear of making mistakes.

Another issue is the belief that we must practice repetitively for hours every day to achieve results, repeating the same problem passage until it is resolved. The trouble is that repeating a problem passage without understanding why we are struggling with it often leads to frustration and tension. This is what I call mechanical repetition, which rarely produces satisfactory results.

The Conscious Musician methodology emerged directly out of my own experience as a student of teachers who relied exclusively on a behaviourist approach. I felt the need to seek new approaches that would allow me to use my full mental, emotional, and physical potential to support healthy, effective practices and stage performances. Teachers need to guide each student to address any musical or technical challenge first at the mental level, to consciously identify the emotions they wish to express, and to regard the body as the foundation of effective, solid instrumental technique. The goal should be to help students become their own best teachers at home, and to abandon mechanical repetition in favour of conscious repetition that can achieve truly satisfying results.

Many musicians are taught from an early age to regard nervousness or performance anxiety as something to overcome or suppress. Do you think we need to change the way we understand those feelings?

Yes. I am convinced that the way performance anxiety is understood in music education needs to change. This phenomenon is often considered natural, and performers are expected simply to accept it and go onstage with the physical and mental sensations of fear associated with playing in front of an audience, as though these feelings were normal. However, this is beginning to change thanks to scientific research conducted in Spain, as well as initiatives such as the Performance Science department at the Royal College of Music in London, Healthy Conservatoires UK, and the Ibero-American Network of Healthy Conservatoires.

In Spain, one study found that performance anxiety among music students is one of the biggest challenges this population faces in their daily practice. Research into this issue in Spanish music education has received limited attention from the research community. In a sample of 479 students enrolled in post-secondary music programs at Spanish institutions, approximately 39% reported anxiety levels above the theoretical mean, according to a questionnaire specifically designed to assess performance anxiety in musicians. This suggests that pedagogical reflection is needed to implement appropriate curricular training plans aimed at reducing rates of performance anxiety (Zarza, F. J., Casanova, Ó. & Orejudo, 2016)

Rather than normalising performance anxiety, we should acknowledge that it is a problem and propose healthier, more effective ways of taking the stage. It is worth noting that this anxiety does not arise solely from our relationship with the stage but also stems from how we practice every day and from our relationship with our instrument. That is why it is important for musicians to conceive of ourselves as athletes: we should prepare our bodies before every practice, use strategies such as motor imagery rehearsal that enable us to use our metacognitive skills to address challenges, and consciously experience the emotions we want to convey. To achieve this, it is important to create coherence in our heart-rate variability through specific techniques such as heart-focused breathing. Another particularly powerful principle is to visualise our musical performance in detail 15 days before a concert, imagining exactly how we want to play and feel that day.

Paulina Derbez

You write about discovering one’s “true artistic self.” What does that mean to you, and how can a musician develop an individual artistic identity without becoming overly self-conscious?

Within The Conscious Musician methodology, becoming your true artistic self means using your own metacognitive, emotional and bodily capacities so that daily practice becomes an enjoyable process. It also means expressing your artistic message freely and powerfully onstage. This can be achieved by engaging in the self-reflection and visualisation techniques that form part of this methodology. Through the kind of focus that comes from rigorous application of the method, students can begin to engage organically and naturally with their artistic selves, without overthinking it or being excessively self-conscious about it.

Your book combines scientific research with ideas about intuition, emotion, and the more mysterious or transcendent qualities of music. How do you reconcile those different ways of understanding musical experience?

Music is an art and a science, and we need to understand both these dimensions to truly appreciate it. This is precisely one of the objectives of The Conscious Musician methodology: to find a balance between an understanding of the mysterious power of music and the application of the scientific research that can help us develop healthy and enjoyable approaches to performance. We need to ourselves as mediums through which the true power of music can be expressed onstage. For this reason, it is important to take a holistic approach, integrating the technical and the creative, to create harmony between mind, heart, and body.

You introduce the idea of the “coherent concert,” in which the performer creates a deeper connection with the audience. What distinguishes this from simply giving a technically accomplished and expressive performance?

In addition to holding a master’s degree in pedagogy, I have a mentor certification from the HeartMath Institute, which for the past 30 years has been studying the concept of heart intelligence and its impact on our physiology and on others. It has been scientifically demonstrated that our heart-rate variability emits an electromagnetic field that affects the heart-rate variability of the people around us.

The term “coherent concert” refers to a process in which the performer, beyond preparing rigorously for a concert, practises techniques that can help achieve heart coherence. In other words, the performer establishes coherence within themselves in order to radiate that signal to the audience. This is a technique known as the heart lock-in. The performer practises it before going onstage through heart-focused breathing. Once the performer has established heart coherence within themselves, they consciously radiate these coherent waves out to the audience the moment they step onstage. So a coherent concert goes beyond technical quality and expressiveness, as it involves the establishment of a true harmonious connection with the audience that can result in a greater appreciation of the performance.

Do you think the culture of classical music – with its emphasis on accuracy, competition, and comparison – can sometimes prevent musicians from experiencing the very qualities of freedom and connection that drew them to music in the first place?

Absolutely. Music competitions are all about determining winners and losers, which has nothing to do with the positive, all-embracing power of music. Comparing ourselves with others can lead to feelings of inferiority and fear. Over time, these emotions affect not only our physiology but also our mental health. As a result, we may lose our love for our art and the joy we once felt when we began this artistic journey.

It is very important to distinguish the purpose of competitions, which don’t really have much to do with music, from our true mission as artists of sound. Each one of us is unique, with special talents that emerge out of the deepest part of our being. For me, what really matters is to feel that passion for music and to feel that we can convey it freely onstage. I see this in my students when they complete The Conscious Musician academic program. They move from a mindset of comparing themselves with others to simply being themselves onstage and enjoying every musical performance.

If a musician reading your book were to change just one aspect of the way they practice or prepare for performance, what would you most like that change to be?

Their belief system. That is where real change begins. Once a musician examines their own belief system and puts into writing how they see their true artistic self, a change begins to happen. This is a process that necessarily involves developing new daily practice habits. It requires rigorous discipline: applying the teaching principles presented in the book every day and keeping alert so as not to fall back into old habits that prevent us from connecting with the music. We need to embrace a new attitude towards music that engages our genuine metacognitive, expressive, and bodily capacities. I would like readers to take away the idea that they are true creators every time they practice their instrument; they are their own Michelangelo, creating wonderful art onstage.

The Invisible Force of Music by Paulina Derbez addresses the implicit need for a transformation of music teaching with an impact on performing on stage. At the same time, it places an emphasis on the invisible force that lives and breathes in music, proposing a new way of releasing that power in a live performance. In this way, music is not merely a form of entertainment but an opportunity for transformation. Find out more

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Between the Notes: Essays on Living With Music

A collection of essays drawn from articles originally published on The Cross-Eyed Pianist and A Piano Teacher Writes… between 2010 and 2026.

What does it mean to live with music?

For musicians, music-making extends far beyond the notes on the page. It is found in the solitude of the practice room, in curiosity and frustration, in our relationships with teachers and repertoire, in the rituals surrounding performance, and in the lifelong process of learning, exploring and returning to the music we love.

In Between the Notes: Essays on Living with Music, pianist, writer and former piano teacher Frances M Wilson (AKA The Cross-Eyed Pianist) brings together a collection of essays exploring the inner life of the musician.

Drawing on more than fifteen years of writing about music and music-making, these essays consider practice and performance, interpretation and artistic autonomy, perfectionism and failure, the pleasures and challenges of amateur musicianship, and the intensely personal relationships we develop with particular pieces of music.

This is not a book about how to play the piano. Instead, it asks broader questions: Why do we make music? What does practising teach us beyond technical accomplishment? How do we develop an interpretation that feels genuinely our own? What does it mean to perform for others? And why does music become such an enduring part of our identity?

Written with warmth, curiosity and the perspective of a lifelong musician, Between the Notes celebrates music-making not simply as something we do, but as something we live with.

Frances Wilson…one of the best writers blogging about classical music

Rhonda Rizzo, writer & pianist

an important voice in the piano world

Peter Donohoe CBE, concert pianist

For professional and amateur musicians, teachers and students, and anyone curious about the life that exists between and beyond the notes.

Written with warmth, curiosity and the perspective of a lifelong musician, Between the Notes celebrates music-making not simply as something we do, but as something we live with.

Available in paperback and eBook.

BUY THE BOOK

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“I can’t play this.”

It is a familiar response to difficulty. A passage refuses to yield, a technical challenge seems beyond us, or we open the score of a piece we long to play and conclude that it is simply too difficult. But add one small word and the meaning changes completely:

“I can’t play this yet.”

That single word transforms a statement of limitation into one of possibility. It acknowledges where we are now without assuming that this is where we will always be.

Learning to play a musical instrument is full of such moments. At the beginning, almost everything seems difficult. Coordinating two hands, reading several notes simultaneously, controlling dynamics, pedalling, producing different articulations – skills which an experienced musician barely thinks about once had to be acquired consciously and painstakingly. Progress can make us forget this. Something which now feels entirely natural may once have seemed impossible.

This is why “yet” can be such a useful word in teaching. A student who says “I can’t do it” has already reached a conclusion. The difficulty has become fixed and personal: I am someone who cannot do this. Add “yet”, and the difficulty becomes temporary. There is something to investigate and learn. This is not simply positive thinking. Telling a student that they can achieve anything if only they try hard enough is neither particularly useful nor necessarily true. Musicians have different physical characteristics, aptitudes, available time and circumstances, and these inevitably affect what is possible. Nor does repeatedly practising something badly make it more achievable. Effort without thought is rarely productive. The value of “yet” lies instead in resisting premature conclusions about our abilities.

Faced with a difficult passage, the useful question is not simply Can I do this? but What is preventing me from doing this at the moment? Perhaps the fingering is awkward. Perhaps the movement is inefficient or unnecessarily tense. Perhaps the passage has not been properly understood harmonically or rhythmically. Perhaps it needs to be dismantled, slowed down, practised in smaller sections or approached in an entirely different way.

Or perhaps we simply need more time.

Musical learning is rarely linear. We may practise something diligently for several days with little apparent improvement and then, after leaving it alone, return to discover that it has somehow become easier. Skills develop incrementally, often beneath the level of conscious awareness. The brain and body continue to assimilate what we have been practising even when we are away from the instrument. This makes patience an essential part of musicianship. It can be particularly difficult for adult learners, who are accustomed to being competent in most areas of their lives. Sitting at a piano and discovering that the fingers will not do something which appears perfectly straightforward can be intensely frustrating. The mind understands; the body has not yet caught up.

Children, too, readily compare themselves with others. Another student plays more advanced repertoire or progresses more quickly, and ability begins to seem like something one either possesses or does not. But comparison tells us remarkably little about our own capacity to learn. We begin from different places and progress at different rates. What matters is not whether someone else can do something now, but whether we are developing the knowledge and skills which may allow us to do it later.

The principle remains relevant however experienced we become. Advanced musicians continually encounter new kinds of difficulty. A composer whose musical language once seemed impenetrable gradually becomes comprehensible; a technical challenge which would have been unthinkable ten years earlier becomes manageable; repertoire we once regarded as permanently beyond us moves within reach.

One of the pleasures of playing over many years is occasionally returning to music we abandoned in the past and discovering that we are now able to understand or play things which defeated us before. The music has not become easier: we have changed. This is also why repertoire should sometimes stretch us. There is little satisfaction in remaining indefinitely with what we already know we can do. The right challenge encourages us to acquire new skills, listen differently and enlarge our musical understanding.

But there is an important distinction between challenge and struggle for its own sake. Not every piece will eventually suit every pianist, and there are times when setting something aside is the intelligent decision. “Not yet” may mean next year, in ten years, or perhaps never – and none of these represents failure.

What matters is that we remain open to the possibility of change.

Teachers have an important role here. Rather than simply supplying solutions, they can help students learn how to investigate difficulties for themselves: to experiment, ask questions, recognise progress and understand that mistakes are information rather than evidence of inadequacy. Gradually the student begins to replace “I can’t” with “How might I?”. That change in language reflects a deeper change in attitude.

The same curiosity can sustain us throughout a lifetime of music-making. However much experience we accumulate, there will always be something we cannot yet play, do or understand. That is not a deficiency but one of the reasons music remains endlessly absorbing. To be a musician is to remain, in some sense, a learner.

And perhaps the real power of “yet” is not that it promises eventual mastery. It simply leaves the door open.