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).
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.
Margaret FingerhutDuncan 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.
Around 20 years ago, I caught the first movement of his ‘Spring’ Sonata for violin and piano on Radio 3 one morning, and was struck by the freshness and optimism of its opening theme. There is something wonderfully youthful about this music: an openness, an eagerness, a sense of possibility, as if everything still lies ahead.
The other spark for the book was my rediscovery of live music, after a period when I was occupied with looking after my young son, in particular via good friend who was a regular at London’s Wigmore Hall. I developed a deep affection for that venue and grew more and more interested in its history, together with a fascination with the people who make music and the particular intensity of live performance. This was some years before I started my blog The Cross-Eyed Pianist, but even then I was interested in what it means to bea musician, though my notion of artistic identity was at that time rather vague. I also wanted to write about music from the point of view of a practising musician as well as a listener, and to explore both the physical and emotional experience of playing certain pieces.
From there, an idea for a book began to emerge featuring two gifted young musicians – a pianist and a violinist. I imagined them playing the ‘Spring’ Sonata together, and gradually their musical partnership became a friendship stretching back to their schooldays. They were talented and ambitious, young people for whom music was not simply something they did but an essential part of who they were. So I started to write and found a narrative emerged surprisingly easily…
I started playing the piano seriously again in 2008, after an absence of some 20 years, and the novel, by now around 180,000 words (!), was set aside as I found an outlet for my writing through this blog and concert reviewing. Over the past 16 years, the many encounters and conversations I’ve had with musicians through concert attending and reviewing, the Meet the Artist interview series, and this site has given me an increasingly rich insight into the musician’s life: the importance of teachers, mentors and colleagues, the routines of practice, the deep preparation and exhilaration of performance, the doubts and disappointments, and the extent to which being a musician is not simply a profession but an identity.
A conversation with a good friend in Spring 2026 and the publication of a new history of the Wigmore Hall set me thinking about those 180,000 words which were lying dormant on a hard drive or memory stick somewhere in my home. At first, I couldn’t locate the files and I convinced myself they were gone for good, and that it didn’t really matter…. But when I did eventually find them again and I started to read the text, I felt there was something worth revising.
Facing the Music follows the activities of two young musicians: Theo Browne, a pianist, and Jonathan Lane-Fox, a violinist. I imagined them in London in the summer of 1914, talented, ambitious and standing on the threshold of successful professional careers. They have been friends since school and their friendship has been forged, above all, through making music together, the ‘Spring’ sonata being their ‘signature piece’. They understand one another through music in ways they cannot always express in words. And then I began to wonder what would happen if music were taken away from them…
I’ve been fascinated by the First World War and its literature since my teens, and have visited the Somme battlefields several times. But I didn’t want to write a conventional war novel. Rather, the war offered an extreme version of something that has come to interest me greatly: what happens when circumstances over which we have little or no control disrupt the life we thought we were going to lead.
This became particularly resonant during the Covid pandemic. In conversations with professional musicians during the lockdowns, I was struck by the sense of dislocation many experienced when concerts and live music disappeared. At first, some welcomed an unexpected period in which to rest, practise without the pressure of engagements, and learn new repertoire. But as the months passed, without the focus of concerts, for many musicians spare time became an affliction rather than a gratification, and they felt bereft without the opportunity to perform and share their music with live audiences. For someone whose sense of self is so closely bound up with making and sharing music, being unable to do so can feel like losing part of one’s identity. That idea found its way into Facing the Music, though in very different circumstances.
Music is therefore not simply a backdrop to the novel. It is embedded in the lives of its characters. Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Bach, Schubert and others accompany Theo and Jonathan through the narrative, and certain works acquire different meanings as their lives change. Music becomes a repository for memory: of people, places, friendships and former selves.
The other important landscape of the novel is Dorset, a county I have been associated with for nearly forty years through my husband and his family – and is now my home. The cliffs, beaches and open skies of the area around Studland and the Isle of Purbeck provide a counterweight to London and, later, the Western Front. For Theo in particular, Dorset represents freedom, sanctuary and continuity – a place to which he can return both physically and in memory.
At the centre of everything, however, is the deep platonic friendship between Theo and Jonathan. Their relationship stretches from schoolboy music-making through youthful ambition and into experiences neither could have anticipated. It is affectionate, occasionally difficult, often humorous. Most importantly, it is inseparable from their musical partnership. Perhaps this is why writing the novel began to feel like a natural extension of the subjects I have explored on this site for so long. The Cross-Eyed Pianist has given me the opportunity to talk to hundreds of musicians about their lives and work: their ambitions, doubts, routines, teachers, friendships, successes and disappointments. Facing the Music allowed me to explore some of those same questions through fiction.
And there was one question to which I kept returning:
If music is part of who you are, what remains when circumstances make music impossible?
I don’t think Facing the Music offers a simple answer. Nor did I want music to function as a sentimental cure for suffering. Music cannot undo experience. But perhaps it can preserve something of who we were – and help us discover who we might become afterwards.
The title has more than one meaning. There is the literal act of facing the music in practice and performance, but also the more familiar meaning: accepting the consequences of choices, circumstances and experience. For Theo and Jonathan, ultimately, it means both.
Author’s note: I am profoundly grateful to the many musicians I have encountered over the years, in person, through their concerts, and via my Meet the Artist interview series. Their insights and reflections on practising, performing, teaching and living with music have greatly enriched my understanding of what it means to be a musician. While none of the characters in the novel is based on any one individual, their experiences have informed many aspects of the story.
In 1965, Alexandra von Triessen arrives at the International Ketterling Competition knowing that one performance could make her career – or expose every weakness she has spent a lifetime learning to conceal. In this rarefied world, perfection is merely the starting point. Forty of the world’s most gifted pianists have come to battle for a prize that promises fame, fortune, and artistic immortality. Alexandra is one of the few women among them—and unlike the men surrounding her, she has no taste for combat.
There she meets Sebastian D’Antonio: magnetic, ambitious, dangerously charming, and born for the spotlight. He offers her passion, glamour, and a place beside him at the center of the musical world. But behind Sebastian stands his enigmatic brother Conrad – a restless composer of staggering genius who wants nothing from fame, yet understands Alexandra’s music, her loneliness, and her deepest desires in ways no one else ever has.
What begins as a contest between virtuosos becomes an intimate war between love and loyalty, talent and ambition, truth and myth. Bound together by music, Alexandra, Sebastian, and Conrad are drawn into a decades-spanning triangle of desire, rivalry, sacrifice, and betrayal – where the most beautiful creation may conceal the most devastating secret.
Descending Thirds is a sweeping, sensual novel about the violence beneath beauty, the loneliness of genius, and the terrible price of becoming unforgettable. It asks the question every artist – and every lover – must eventually answer: Do you choose the life that brings you applause, the person who promises you devotion, or the truth that sets your heart on fire?
Interview with author of Descending Thirds, Nicole Conn
Who or what inspired you to pursue your creative career?
My first concert hall was the floor beneath my mother’s piano.
As a child, I would lie underneath it while she practiced Beethoven and Chopin for hours. I felt the vibrations move through the floor and into my body before I had any intellectual understanding of what I was hearing. Music entered me as sensation, emotion and story. Long before I understood harmony or musical form, I understood that music could say what ordinary language could not.
My mother was a brilliant pianist and later became a lauded teacher. She gave me far more than an appreciation of classical music. She taught me, simply by playing, that art can hold grief, desire, fury, tenderness and contradiction all at once. Even as Parkinson’s began taking command of her hands, her relationship with the piano endured. That was extraordinarily painful to witness, but also profound. Her body was becoming less dependable, yet the music remained part of her identity. It made the relationship between memory, the body and artistic expression very real to me.
Christa Hoven, Nicole Conn’s mother
I came to filmmaking and writing through that same desire to express the inexpressible. Film gave me image, language, silence, performance and music—all the elements through which interior life can be revealed. And I’ve always considered the score the soul of a film.
Descending Thirds grew directly out of that inheritance. It is dedicated to my mother, who gave me classical music; to my daughter Gabrielle, whose birth sparked the most compelling muse; and to my son Nicholas, who is non-verbal and extremely Special. I played classical music that was put in his isolette in the NICU. While he cannot communicate, his passion for classical music inspires me every day.
Who or what have been the most significant influences on your career?
My mother remains the beginning of everything. Beethoven and Chopin were part of the atmosphere of our home, almost like another language spoken in the family. Through her, I learned that music was not decoration. It was an emotional necessity.
The composers who shaped Descending Thirds were also significant influences on me personally. I’m mad for Bach as is Conrad in the novel, our genius savant. Beethoven embodies the battle between limitation and will. Schubert carries an ache that can become indistinguishable from beauty. Rachmaninoff gives us emotional sweep without apology. Prokofiev is danger, volatility and modernity. Debussy taught me about colour and atmosphere, and Chopin about intimacy – the ability to make something whispered feel enormous.
But my musical influences are not limited to composers. Cinema taught me to think musically. A film has rhythm, phrasing, counterpoint, repetition, crescendo and silence. A cut can function like a percussive strike; a sustained shot can be a held note. Dialogue has tempo. Characters can move in harmony or dissonance. I have always written and directed with an awareness of those things, even when there is no literal music playing. And I always use one or two composers to be the backbone of every project I do and listen to them incessantly from pre-production right through to editing.
The central musical idea in Descending Thirds comes through Conrad: that music is already everywhere – the wind, footsteps, machinery, conversation and the spaces between sounds. In the novel he hears the legato movement of water, the rhythmic exchange of tennis balls, leaves becoming snare drums in the wind, and even the pizzicato of a coffee maker.
More recently, Mary Jane Wells and Sally Bishop Melbourne have influenced how I understand my own work. Mary Jane revealed rhythms, humour and emotional undercurrents in the prose that even I had not fully heard. Sally gave an audible life to music that had previously existed only in my imagination. Both reminded me that collaboration does not diminish an artist’s vision. With the right people, it expands it.
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
The greatest challenge has been keeping faith with the original impulse of a work while surviving the practical realities required to bring it into the world. In other words – funding!
Independent filmmaking teaches you very quickly that artistic vision and commerce are uneasy but unavoidable companions a thread pursued throughout the novel. You may begin with something deeply personal, but eventually that work must pass through financing, production, distribution, marketing and an industry that often wants certainty from an art form built upon risk. The challenge is knowing where to compromise and where compromise would damage the reason the work exists.
Descending Thirds presented another kind of challenge. I carried and refined the story for approximately twenty-five years. I had to translate music into language without turning the book into a musicology lesson. The technical details had to be credible, but the emotional experience had to come first. I want readers to fall in love with classical music. They shouldn’t need conservatory training to understand what Alexandra experiences when she performs.
Perfectionism has also been a lifelong challenge. And while pursuing it, not feeling entirely like an imposter. Both issues that Alexandra experiences as an artist. Yes, we must push ourselves to the limit, but perfectionism can also become a form of paralysis or cruelty.
That pressure is not confined to classical music. Film and publishing have their own versions of it. The work is never finished enough, financed enough, marketable enough or safe enough. My challenge has been to continue making things despite that.
Of which works are you most proud?
My book Descending Thirds, and especially the extraordinary audiobook created with Mary Jane Wells and Sally Bishop Melbourne.
The novel is probably the longest and most complex “score” I have ever written. Music is not simply its setting. It is the language through which the characters love, compete, betray one another, conceal themselves and, occasionally, tell the truth. The challenge of the audiobook was to make that musical dimension audible without overwhelming the narrative.
Multi Award winning Voice Artist, Mary Jane Wells did far more than narrate the book. She performed it. She gave the characters distinct inner lives but never reduced them to voices or theatrical effects. Alexandra’s reserve, Sebastian’s magnetism, Conrad’s stillness, Chandra’s irreverence and the many other tonal and cultural distinctions had to coexist within one performance. Mary Jane brought emotional precision, intelligence and an extraordinary sense of musical timing to the language. Her ability to deliver every shade of nuance and subtext makes the listener experience so much more depth than I knew was possible.
Mary introduced me to Sally Bishop Melbourne who then undertook something I had once thought impossible: she composed the music the two brothers, Sebastian and Conrad compose. They couldn’t be more different and so she had to imagine what Conrad and Sebastian would create, how their musical identities would differ and how those differences would reveal character. The audiobook contains more than seventy musical moments, bringing together passages from the classical repertoire with Sally’s original compositions.
Several of the classical works were drawn from my mother’s repertoire, so the finished recording became personal on multiple levels. It brought together my mother’s musical legacy, the fictional world I had carried for so many years, Mary Jane’s performance and Sally’s original music. A side note: Sally had suffered the passing of her son, Will, a few years earlier and had been in a state of depression. Composing for the two brothers created in her a new zest for life and creativity.
Descending Thirds has become so healing on so many levels. It was so lovely to see and hear the excitement in her voice and music as she would share the pieces with me.
The moments of which I am proudest are those in which the boundaries disappear—when narration, character, classical music and original composition become one dramatic language. It is one of the rare occasions when the finished work became larger than the version I had heard privately in my imagination.
Whatkind of things in regular life inspire your creative ideas?
I always write what I know—not necessarily as literal autobiography, but from emotional truths I have lived at the very deepest level. My films, scripts and the documentary I made about my son, Little Man, have grown out of some of the most extreme experiences of the human condition: love, disability, motherhood, sacrifice, grief, survival and the complicated ways people try to make themselves bearable to themselves. My next feature, do we not grieve, explores the severe trauma I experienced after the loss of my sister—my best friend—to an extremely violent suicide. I am drawn to the moments when our carefully constructed selves begin to fracture: how do we handle fear, tragedy, the unexpected and who do we become under the klieg lights during those events in our lives.
I believe this emotional honesty is why many people watch my films repeatedly. The circumstances may not mirror their own lives, but the feelings ring true, resonate and can become part of their healing.
My children remain an enormous source of inspiration: Gabrielle’s birth awakened the first impulse that became Descending Thirds, while Nicholas’s experience of classical music reminds me that our most powerful responses to art are often immediate, instinctive and beyond explanation.
What is your definition of success?
Success is completing a work without betraying the reason it came to you—and then allowing it to reach another person.
Awards, reviews, sales and recognition matter. Anyone who says they do not matter is probably being slightly disingenuous. Art requires an audience, and artists need practical ways to continue working. But those things cannot be the final measure.
My deeper concern is whether the work has emotional integrity. Did I tell the truth of the story as fully as I could? Did I resist making it safer merely to make it easier to sell? Did I always ask the question, “what is the best thing for this specific project?” And what survives the distance between what I imagined and what I was capable of creating?
Then there is the audience. Success occurs when someone recognizes part of themselves in the work—even when their life bears no obvious resemblance to the characters’ lives. A reader may know nothing about international piano competitions but understand Alexandra’s fear of not being enough. Someone may never have composed a note but recognize Conrad’s desire to create without becoming a commodity. Another person may see in Sebastian the terrible distance between ability and the art of packaging and commerce.
But for me probably the greatest measure of success are those fans who have written and told me they have seen one of my films ten times, fifty times. They watch one of my films weekly. And those fans who use my films to heal from their own broken stories.
What advice would you give to young or aspiring musicians?
Learn your craft so thoroughly that technique becomes freedom rather than confinement. Practise with discipline, but do not confuse punishment with discipline. They are not the same thing.
Protect the part of yourself that first responded to music before you understood whether you were playing it “correctly.” Technique is indispensable, but technique alone cannot explain why one performance leaves us admiring and another leaves us changed. In Descending Thirds, Alexandra’s first teacher tells her that anyone can execute notes, but not everyone possesses the soul or feeling for music. She also makes it clear that the gift does not excuse the work: practice, practice more, and then practice again.
Be absolutely passionate about your craft. If you’re not, then the piano, writing, making films becomes a massive amount of work without reward. It’s too competitive and arduous not to be driven by a relentless compulsion to do the work.
What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music’s audiences?
Classical music does not need to become less profound. It needs to become less forbidding.
We need serious, sustained music education in schools, access to instruments and live performance, affordable tickets and programs that reach people where they actually live. A child should not require affluent parents or proximity to a major city to encounter an orchestra or touch a piano.
We also need better storytelling. Tell audiences what was emotionally at stake when a piece was written. Reveal the human being inside the monument. I found while researching for Descending Thirds incredible stories about so many composers. They were not just marble busts. They were ambitious, difficult, desirous, frightened, funny, competitive and frequently chaotic. I loved their flawed humanity.
Descending Thirds and its audiobook are my attempt to create an entry point to classical music. A listener may arrive because of the searing triangular love story and discover Rachmaninoff; another may arrive for the music and become absorbed in the characters.
The tension between accessibility and artistic truth is examined repeatedly in the novel. One character argues that the performer’s job is to excite the public and make people like the music; another asks whether a musician’s obligation is instead to remain true to how they feel it. I do not think those aims have to be enemies. Accessibility is not simplification. It is invitation.
What’s the one thing in the music industry we’re not talking about which you think we should be?
The human cost of excellence. We celebrate the prodigy, the winner, the standing ovation and the apparently flawless performance. We are less willing to ask what was required psychologically to produce them. Humiliation is still sometimes defended as rigorous teaching. Anxiety is treated as weakness. Physical injury, isolation, eating disorders, substance dependence and depression can be regarded as unfortunate but almost predictable by-products of serious artistic life.
Young musicians are often taught to make their entire identities dependent upon ranking, casting, competitions, reviews and access to a field with very few places at the top. They are told to become singular while simultaneously being trained to satisfy institutions, juries, conductors, managers, audiences and algorithms. That is a nearly impossible psychological contradiction.
We also need to discuss how easily image can eclipse artistry. Charisma, mythology and marketability have always influenced musical careers, but contemporary media can intensify that pressure until the artist becomes a brand performing an approved version of the self. Descending Thirds explores all these dynamics — the danger of a world in which perception, promotion and commercial mythology begin to carry as much authority as the music itself. Sebastian even argues that audiences prefer the beautiful myth—that performers such as he make music accessible because they embody what people want to believe.
There must be room for ambition, discipline and exacting standards. But we should be able to distinguish rigor from cruelty and excellence from self-destruction.
What next? Where would you like to be in 10 years time?
The immediate next chapter is to bring Descending Thirds to the screen as a limited series. The novel was always intensely visual to me: the competition halls, the opposing pianos, the orchestra’s and concert halls, Antonia’s mythological gardens, the changing decades and, above all, the physical experience of music passing through the characters. A limited series would allow the story the time it needs. It could preserve the psychological complexity of Alexandra, Sebastian and Conrad while finally allowing audiences to hear the music that governs their lives. I pitch it as an Epic Emmy Prestige Limited Mini-Series.
I’m also in development on my next feature, do we not grieve and publishing my next novel, Armand’s Tango in 2027.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Spending as much time with my extended intended family of six adult children and my precious granddaughter, Ocean. I identify first and foremost as a Mom or “Granny CoCo”.
Creating. I have been blessed in my life to have so many people make it possible for me to continue making films, shows, and writing books. I am further blessed by a workaholic muse. I am utterly passionate about my work and am extremely grateful for this endless drive.
The other things I am passionate about are the 4 P’s: Puppy (Lady Bugs) Puzzles, Poker and Pot!
What is your most treasured possession?
I’ve never been a “thing” person. My treasured possessions are my family!
What is your present state of mind?
Grateful, restless, slightly overwhelmed and deeply determined.
Completing Descending Thirds after carrying it for twenty-five years might have felt like an ending. Instead, the book, audiobook and developing screen adaptation have made it feel like the beginning of an entirely new creative life. I am trying to remain open to that without becoming so consumed by the destination that I fail to hear what is happening along the way. Process has always been key for me.
Descending Thirds by Nicole Conn is available now in paperback and audiobook format
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