THE STORY OF MY MUSICAL FLUENCY JOURNEY

My passion for music began when I was very young, and the piano quickly became my world. I loved patterns and shapes, like so many children, and of course, I loved stories.

With the encouragement of my music-loving grandmother, I would improvise at the piano from a very early age. I discovered a few simple combinations of notes and began to play with them, quite innocently, as a kind of musical storytelling. Even though the material was simple, it somehow felt meaningful., even epic and magical. There was a sense of movement and unfolding — something I would later recognise as the essence of rhythm or groove.

The influence of two very different teachers

My first teacher, Ella Pounder, encouraged this kind of exploration. And at 14, I had lessons with the wonderful Denis Matthews. Both these teachers recognised my love of fluent expression, and allowed it to develop without pressure. But at the age of 9, for 5 years, I had a very different teacher, whose approach focused heavily on technique and theory, and on making rapid progress. For a time, this began to interfere with the natural way of relating to music that I had developed. I suspect that some version of this experience is quite common.

One day, I went to the piano with a strong sense that I wanted to recover that earlier, more direct way of playing. Without really knowing how, I stopped trying to follow what I had been taught, and allowed myself to return to simple patterns and musical shapes — to just play and explore again. Something shifted quite quickly. The sense of flow returned, along with that feeling of making music as a kind of unfolding story.

At that point, I became curious about what I was actually doing. As I began to look more closely, I noticed that the keyboard seemed to organise itself differently when I played in this way. It no longer felt like a linear sequence of notes, but more like a connected space. I also started to recognise that rhythmic movement was not about counting fixed note values, but about shaping gestures in time — almost as if I was “saying” something through the instrument.

From that moment on, I became increasingly interested in understanding and developing this way of working. Although I continued with formal training, I quietly rebelled, exploring my own approach privately, and it quickly began to influence my playing more broadly. Over time, my skills developed rapidly — which kept my teacher happy, as I passed lots of exams with distinction and won lots of competitions. In a way, by providing me with something to rebel quietly against made him also an amazing teacher!

A different kind of musicianship

After a few years, this way of working had become well established. I found that even highly complex pieces of music could be approached through the same underlying sense of structure and flow. This made learning much easier, but more importantly, it changed the experience of playing. Music felt connected, responsive, and alive.

After my years with Denis Matthews, I went to the Royal Northern College of Music, where I performed a large amount of classical repertoire, won awards and competitions and took part in public performances as a soloist. While this brought its own obvious rewards, I was aware that it was not, in itself, what drew me to music.

What mattered more was the experience I had discovered from the very beginning: the sense of expression, the clarity, the feeling of being inside the music rather than managing it from the outside. For me, playing fluently is something closer to a form of therapy or meditation — a way of connecting with innermost feelings. Music is the language for expressing and experiencing inward experience and deep feelings which are otherwise difficult if not impossible to reach.