I write this while Grigory Sokolov, one of the greatest living pianists, plays a recital of some of the greatest works of all time, including Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, on the TV in my living room. It is meticulously recorded and produced to show every gesture and facial expression.

And I’m treating it like background music.

As I fast-forward through the applause to get to the encores (three rarely-played pieces by Rameau -- no, make that four. Now five.), I contemplate which of the masters to put on next. Martha Argerich playing Prokofiev? Horowitz playing Rachmaninoff or Rubinstein playing Chopin? Du Pre playing Elgar? Will I listen to Jonathan Biss playing a Beethoven sonata, or just listen to Schnabel himself?

I do exaggerate my sacrilege a bit. When Sokolov begins his sixth encore, a Brahms intermezzo that I’ve heard a hundred times, his playing commands my attention, and I am enraptured. And when Amazon Prime begins to autoplay the next video, a Yuja Wang recital of Schubert and Schumann, I pause it, shamed by my own writing to give more respect to the music.

Even though I was building websites as a child since the Geocities days in the mid-90s, my early musical education was squarely in the pre-YouTube, pre-streaming era. The recordings I grew up with were the handful that my parents owned and the albums I took back with me from visits to my grandparents' house. These were mostly the popular albums of the day: Van Cliburn's Tchaikovsky Concerto, Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations, and my grandparents' treasure, the complete Beethoven symphonies recorded by Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Just because these recordings were mainstream doesn't mean they weren't great – even today Toscanini's Beethoven symphonies remain among my favorites, and I may never have fallen in love with Bach if I hadn't grown up with Gould's Goldbergs. But the point is that my early musical sensibilities were very much formed by the limited music that was available to me – more nurture than nature, as it were.

The greatest source of this nurture came not from my parents and grandparents, but from my teacher, Natalie. One of the key features of her teaching was monthly performance classes where her students would play for each other. I appreciated them but can't say I really looked forward to them – except for the last one of the year. Natalie gave each student a gift at the last performance class of the year: a recording from her collection tailored to each student individually for summer listening.

Just as I was playing my first Chopin etude and feeling good about my accomplishment, she gave me a recording of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes to show me how much farther there was still left to go ("Never rest on your laurels", she'd say). One year she spent focusing on the development of the piano and gave me Jerome Lowenthal's Steinway Dynasty, featuring ten different Steinways from the mid 19th century to today. The most disappointing was the year she gave me a recording of 30 different pianists all playing the same 2-minute etude, Chopin Op. 10 No. 1, but the lesson that there are an endless number of ways to play the same piece of music still stays with me. There was Yundi Li's Liszt sonata to give me a flavor for what the piano competition world was talking about. Then there was Boris Berman's Prokofiev concerti, which blew my mind by introducing me to music past Debussy for the first time.

And so it was that I was exposed to the world of classical music. Curated based on what she felt I needed, I inhaled each of those recordings. How much each one affected my tastes and my playing is hard to say exactly. Only occasionally was it tactical. Going into high school, I was to learn the Schumann Concerto, but I had never actually heard it before, so she gave me Byron Janis's recording to get me excited about it over the summer. For most of the music I played, though, I was given no recording, just a score so that I was forced to develop my own way in to the music. Only after a piece was learned would we sit in her living room with the music in front of us and say "Let's see what Rubinstein does with this Polonaise" and then "And what does Horowitz do differently?" ("Other than the tempo", she'd always add. Don't even think about playing it that fast.)

Every recording was listened to with intent. And when there was something worth stealing from one of the great masters, it still needed justification. When I studied the Bach C Minor Fantasy (BWV 906), we listened to Gould, of course, but I wasn't allowed to follow him blindly and play it at half tempo without a musical reason of my own.

I didn't always have the discipline to resist temptation, however, even before recordings were readily available on YouTube. As a teenager I played my first Rachmaninoff Prelude, the gorgeous Op. 23 No. 4 in D Major. I found the notes not particularly difficult, but I found myself in that pattern oh-so-familiar to music students where you think you've "finished" a piece and are ready to move on, but every time you bring it into a lesson, your teacher is not quite satisfied with it and says "one more week." After a few of these lessons, even Natalie remarked to herself, almost puzzled, "Hm, I guess you just don't get this piece."

And so I left that day and bought Richter's recording. Undoubtedly a musical legend, Richter had for whatever reasono never really connected with me personally (or with Natalie). For that reason, I often chose his recordings of the pieces I played to listen to. They were guaranteed not to stray far from the score, they'd give me a different perspective, and they wouldn't tempt me to just copy what he did. But the next day at the piano, I decided to try an experiment. I put on headphones and I played along with Richter.

It's one thing to play along with a Mozart concerto that for the most part rolls along with the metronome, another altogether to try to play along with a lyrical Rachmaninoff prelude, which leaves so much room for rubato, when the performer might take some extra time here and give it back there. Luckily, Richter plays this prelude straighter than many pianists, but even so, it took a lot of practice to match the timing exactly, and then the dynamics and the voicing and the pedaling and so on. Of course the sound would never be 100% right, by the end of the week, I could play the piece with Richter note-for-note.

I had no rationale for the musical choices that were made. I didn't think about it at all. I just tried to play exactly like Richter. I figured, if Natalie still didn't like it, then she was saying she didn't like Richter either. In hindsight, it was a bit like Artificial Intelligence's Chinese Room argument. If my "output" was the same as Richter's, would an educated listener be able to tell that there was no substance backing it up, or would it just sound beautiful?

When I finished playing for Natalie the following week, she immediately exclaimed, "Wow! You really got it!"

That moment was the most ashamed I ever felt in a piano lesson, and for the rest of her life, I was never able to tell her how I had cheated.

There's an argument that could be made that I shouldn't have felt ashamed, and that making beautiful music is the only thing that matters. There's nothing to feel bad about for playing like one of the greatest pianists ever, some might say. At one point I might have been convinced of that logic, but the feeling of shame I felt from that compliment put that argument to rest for me. People speak of plagiarism in academia and forgery in art, but regardless of whether "great artists steal", there should be a parallel concept in music. There's already a way to hear Richter's recording, and if you say it doesn't feel the same as coming from a real piano, I imagine that's just a temporary technological shortcoming. That's not the why of music-making.

After that lesson, I "finished" that piece. I did tape myself playing it a couple months later – I backed off of Richter's interpretation a bit, but it's still there, and I never did feel like I really "got" this beautiful prelude.

When I was 22, fresh out of college, I found myself, for the first time in 19 years of studying piano, without a teacher. So, I chose a piece that I had grown up listening to and always wanted to play, but never had the time to learn with deadlines for performances, juries, etc. – the Ravel Ondine.

Natalie's Ondine was the Ondine that I grew up listening to. The first CD I was given was Natalie's own, one of the first ever four-channel recordings, with music from as early as 18th century Rameau and ending with the 20th century Prokofiev Toccata. But the gem for me growing up was always the Ravel Ondine, and I've never lost my bias for her performance, even among greats like Argerich, De Larrocha, Michaelangeli.

So here was a piece that I had an overall picture of before I looked at the music, but which I had never taken apart, and I was completely on my own. How would I approach it?

After the initial stage of getting the notes, I managed to hold my discipline for a bit and do a bit of analysis. I took apart the themes and motifs, mapped how they developed, and came up with potential ways to map Ondine's story to the music. I was fairly happy with the way I played. But I wanted more and better and I gave in. I watched every masterclass I could find on YouTube. I listened to recordings from Perlemuter and from a dozen different Juilliard and Curtis students in piano competitions. As I once heard Menahem Pressler say in a masterclass, "Be like a bee. Take from everywhere you can, and then produce your honey." Like so many amateur pianists today, YouTube became my teacher. I did listen with intent, and justified everything I stole, but I stole a lot. I took something I liked from Pogorelich, something from Casadesus, something from Lucas Debargue. Or at least I think I did. Nobody cites their sources during a piano performance.

Some of these ideas were undoubtedly better than the ones I had before. But it still didn't feel right. The biggest compliment I had ever received as a pianist was that my playing was authentic. What was it now? Was it still me?

In all likelihood, the "me" was still in there, and more prominent than I thought it was, but I could no longer sort out what it was and what it wasn't. Add to this that Ravel didn't even want his music "interpreted" in the first place, just played "straight", and I was thoroughly confused. I turned the corner when I decided to send a copy of my performance to a friend, and ended up listening to one more recording – my own. I spent hours going over my own performance and analyzing it and changing it and re-recording it. Finally, this last pass clarified for me what exactly I was trying to do with the piece and what every accent, every rubato, and every note was in service to.

I've played the piece often since I made that first recording on a practice piano at my office late one night, and it evolves with every performance I give of it. Ondine's story tells of a water nymph who, like a Siren, attempts to lure a mortal into her kingdom underwater. Finally, the mortal speaks, and says they love someone else and will not follow. Ondine cackles and disappears. Depending on the piano, the audience, and how I'm feeling, it may be quicker, darker, angrier, or more seductive. And if I'm in the mood to listen to Ondine, I still usually listen to Natalie's recording, not my own, despite everything I put into it. But I believe that my performance of it has a place in this world. That someone I've played it for connected with something they hadn't before, and that someone will again.

Since that day, I've relied more and more on recording and analyzing my own practice sessions and less and less on listening to other pianists. Before starting work on the Goldberg Variations, I forced myself to stop listening to recordings of them entirely for months, lest Gould find his way back into my head. But those great recordings are as seductive as Ondine, and it's difficult to imagine coming of age as a pianist in the YouTube era. How do you have the discipline to listen to heed your teacher's advice on a given Beethoven sonata when you have at your fingertips the opinions of Schiff, Goode, Kempff, Pollini, Kovacevich, Frank, Arrau, Badura-Skoda, Brendel, and Schnabel, to name but a few – let alone the young pianists who have played them in winning campaigns in the Cliburn competition, or the Tchaikovsky, or the Queen Elisabeth, or the Leeds, or the Rubinstein.

Some musicians bemoan the ubquity of recordings as a major factor in a perceived lack of originality and variety in music-making today. I think there's probably some truth to that. When recordings are used as SparkNotes to fast-track an analysis, certain potential interpretative paths are necessarily bypassed. Further, when certain recordings are as revered as the ones mentioned above, it takes a substantial amount of courage to go against the grain and say, "I disagree with Brendel here." Works like the Beethoven sonatas comprise the pianist's bible, and to dare to disagree means to risk the admonishment of a teacher saying "that's not what Beethoven means by this marking." The result is a student who studies the sacred text, and in the words of Madeleine Thein's character Zhuli, "plays Beethoven as if he had never been alive."

The irony, of course, is that those great recordings have no shortage of disagreements with each other, and any pianist who's played a Beethoven sonata for more than a couple different teachers has found themself with directly contradictory advice. In tech, we talk of standing on the shoulders of giants to reach greater and greater heights. In music, our giants loom so large that we can never get to their shoulders in the first place. It's simply not the case that a pianist can take Richter as a starting point and then always be playing at least as well as him.

The music student today simply cannot avoid the great figures of the musical past, and must instead have a strong enough sense of self to stand tall when she is inevitably confronted with and compared to her heroes. This, YouTube cannot teach.

What is the musical equivalent of Hello World? The C Major scale? A harmonized Happy Birthday? Pachelbel’s Canon?

When I wrote the above at 2 in the morning, I didn't expect to try to answer it seriously, but it's come across my mind a few times today, and I figured, if this blog is the place where I'm going to get all the junk out of my head, I might as well start here.

The "Hello, World" exercise is typically the simplest possible code that a programmer can write – literally, it just puts those two words on the screen, saying hello to the world. Still, it does serve a couple purposes. First, it lets the programmer know that something, anything, is happening – if nothing else, she at least knows that she can run her code successfully in her language of choice. Second, it's not the worst entry point to comparing unfamiliar programming languages. What it does is so basic that anyone can look at a piece of code and make some sort of judgment.

Even (or especially) if you've never written a line of code before in your life, you'd likely choose to start learning this language:

print "Hello, World!"

over this one:

          .data
 msg:     .asciiz "Hello, World!"
          .align 2
          .text
          .globl main      
 main:
          la $a0,msg
          li $v0,4
          syscall
          jr $ra

It's important to note that the former, in Python, has a lot going on under the hood. There's a lot happening that the programmer isn't necessarily aware of – it may come back to bite her in the future when she tries to do something more complicated, or it may not. The latter example, in assembly, looks much more like "code" than English, but it gives the author finer-grained control over exactly what happens.

I'd have to think that for Western Classical music, the equivalent to a "Hello, World" program is either playing a scale or a note. Playing a scale is the first thing we're often taught when we first approach an instrument, but I think there's plenty to unpack just in playing a single note.

Comparing instruments to programming languages, playing a note on the piano is like writing "Hello, World" in Python (print "Hello, World"). It's possible for someone to literally let their hand fall and let gravity play the note for them, ignoring the complexity under the hood (or in this case, the piano lid).

On the other hand, a string instrument (i.e. violin, viola, cello, bass) requires the proper contact between bow and string, a properly tuned instrument, a rosined and tightened bow, placement of the bow at the right angle at the right part of the instrument, and a steady pull of the bow. In return, the player gets much more control over the sound than they would on a piano, including the ability to make a note get louder after playing it and my personal source of jealousy, the ability to vibrate the pitch. Here's a violinist's take:

This trade off of low-level effort for a great deal of control resembles the C programming language quite a bit.

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main() {
  printf("Hello, World!\n");
  return 0;
}

I've never studied the woodwinds or brass, except for the one time I tried to make a sound on a friend's flute and failed miserably. Because you blow across the blowhole, not into it, getting the air flow right feels to me like magic. As for a programming language, how about Java, whose incantation is so magic-filled that it will often take a new student months before they really understand everything that's happening?

class HelloWorld {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello, World!");
  }
}

It's important to say that once you get past "Hello, World" to writing a non-trivial piece of code, everything changes. Likewise with playing an instrument.

I'd like to go back now to the Python of instruments, the piano, and what its "Hello, World" might look like in more detail. Not too long ago Professor Robin McCabe asked me what verb I might use to describe how you physically make sound on the piano to someone on the street. My cello teacher growing up, the wonderful Lois Errante, had a way with these kinds of explanations; one in particular stays with me still: "Let the left hand fingers hang like off a window ledge." Alas, one doesn't play piano by hanging off the keys from below, Glenn Gould notwithstanding. I knew what the naive-but-wrong answer was – you don't "press" the keys since you'd end up a tight mess with your fingers and arms locked up, unable to produce much nuance – but the right answer escaped me.

Before my long time piano teacher, Natalie Maynard, passed away, she gave me photocopies of a dozen or so pages of her notes from Juilliard which startled me then, and which to this day I look back on from time to time. They're from her time with Sascha Gorodnitzki, one of the great piano pedagogues of the day, with whom she studied towards the end of a seven-year graduate scholarship.

When Natalie gave me these notes, she did so with no introduction. I was in high school at that point, and she merely mentioned that they may interest me in some capacity. I went home after that lesson, eager to get a glimpse at what advanced secrets she might have been privy to at that point in her education, and I set to work deciphering her scribblings.

They begin:
I. Scales

1. Rest hand without sounding on 1st 5 notes of C Maj.
2. Turn hand slightly (out) so that thumb lies at an angle on key (weight of hand leaning towards thumb)
3. depress thumb (from surface of key - not alone - this will prevent a bang thumb) + simultaneously raise curved 2nd finger to height of knuckles (keep 2nd finger curved - never straight - just from big knuckle)

etc.

She was studying how to play a C Major scale! Often the very first exercise given to a brand new piano student of any age (and if you recall, one of my candidates for a musical "Hello, World"), she was going over it at the end of a graduate degree at Juilliard – and it's not because she never learned it. There are any number of lessons to be extracted from this – the importance of fundamentals being chief among them – both from the fact that Gorodnitzki was compelled to teach the C Major scale at this stage and the fact that Natalie was compelled to take notes about it.

Then there is the question of the content of these instructions, at once both obvious and specific. Many pianists, upon reading them, will try them on for size, mimic the steps on a table, think "that looks about right" and move on. Others will find points of disagreement, perhaps in the details of step 3. Others still will think, "I wish this was explained more like 'hang from the window ledge'. That's much easier to follow."

But in this particular instance, I'm still looking for a verb to describe how a pianist makes sound on the instrument. There's "rest", "turn", "depress", and "raise". Taken together (modulo some notion of horizontal motion), these actually do tell most of the story of playing the piano – "depress" being the one that is closest to the actual production of sound. I'm no linguist, but my hunch is that "depress" really isn't that far off etymologically from "press." Still, the connotation is different. If instead of telling a student to "press" the keys, you instruct him to "depress" them, you may occasionally end up with some dark minor-key music, but most of the time the student will end up with less tension at the instrument.

What less tension really translates to – whether or not it results in a better or even different tone being produced from the instrument – is beyond the scope of this first post. The piano is a marvelously complex instrument, and there's much to understand past print "Hello, World". I hope to explore a bit of this in the writing to follow.