Six years ago, I was practicing the piano in preparation for taking a lesson when I had a sudden idea: How about I write a piano method? This seemed absurd on many levels. For instance, back then I really didn’t play the piano well. Writing a piano method was as plausible as writing a brain surgery manual. “Buy a melon. Sharpen a knife. Practice cutting it. No, dummy! Don’t cut the knife, cut the melon! And don’t sever the melon’s optic nerve!”

Oxford University Press is bringing it out in May, 2023. 48 pedagogical video clips, more than a hundred performance clips. Melons, mangoes, overripe peaches, cherries. Did you know that cherry juice looks very similar to blood?

The method is called Creative Health for Pianists: Concepts, Exercises & Compositions. It’s less absurd than you think. First, you can learn a lot in six years. It’s pretty much like med school. You go in thinking that babies are delivered by storks to a cabbage patch next to the parking lot of the maternity ward, and you come out knowing about the bees and the mangoes. Pollination is procreation. Babies R Us. By the time of publication, my own piano playing will be unrecognizable from where it was back when I had my sudden idea. It has “grown,” you know.

Also, “creative health” isn’t “flashy piano technique.” Did I call my method “flashy piano technique”? No. I called it Brain Surgery Without Anesthetics: Find a Willing Melon. It’s very tempting to think that a piano method necessarily focuses on the nitty-gritty of physical technique. But my whole endeavor really has to do with the creative process, the choices that you make when confronted with a stimulus, the broadening of your field of perception, the lessening of fear and doubt regarding your progress. It’s quite simple: You Aren’t the Melon, You’re the Surgeon. Fear Not!

And what is this thing about having a sudden idea? You were sitting at the piano and a light bulb went on? A bell rang? A mouse squeaked? A balloon popped? A length of bubble wrap committed the one-thousand hara kiri?

That’s right. I was sitting at the piano like a good boy, and a bubble gum pooped on my head. I mean, popped in my head. A sudden idea is actually the sudden removal to an obstacle standing in the way of an idea. It’s a permission, an encouragement, a push. The idea wants to come in, but you aren’t welcoming her. You’re shy, and the idea is very pretty, and you find it hard to talk to pretty ideas. And, poop! I mean, pop! You temporarily let down your defenses, and the idea sees an opportunity and grabs you by the mangoes. You and the idea start dating. Babies R Us! Concepts, exercises, and compositions, lots of them, high fertility and low mortality!

A sudden idea is, essentially, a change of heart. You accept and submit; you accept that writing a piano method is the exact thing that you want to do and should do, and you submit to the impulse to work compulsively for years and years, never complaining, and always pissing and moaning. It’s one thing when the pretty idea is your girlfriend, and another thing when she’s your wife. (I’m not talking about my actual loving wife Alexis, by the way; this is all Symbols and Metaphors, or S&M.) (Let me explain.) (No, please don’t let me explain.)

You can write a method because you know something, or you can write a method because you want to learn something. The writing is part of how you learn. I have a memoir in the works. It’s tentatively titled How I Learned Brain Surgery by Practicing on Myself. So far I only have the first word of first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter, but I think it’ll be a great book.