My Educations and Background:

I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Physics from ZhongShan (Dr.Sun Yet-Sen) University, Canton, China. And a Master's Degree in Computer Science from University of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA.

I play piano since my childhood, studied with a renowned piano teacher Mak, Pik Har at the Music Conservatory in Canton, China. She is over 80 year's old now I am still in touch with her. When I grew up, I am interested in reading piano literatures. The first great book I read was "The Art of Piano Playing" (by Heinrich Neuhaus) which I borrowed from her. It was said that the book is the Russian pianist's bible. I like the book a lot. In those days during Culture Revolution in China, there was no way to find this book to buy, neither a copier. I had to copy the whole book with my own hand writing. During the long years, I had dumped many books, by I always keep this one.

I read some more books and literatures on piano. Some of them are good, some of them are not. Of the good books, Abby Whiteside's "Indispensable of Piano Playing" impressed me a lot. She was a very revolutionary teacher but her English is very hard to read, you have to read and re-read again to catch the point and a few viewpoints are very extreme. Some readers at Amazon.com have the same feeling as I did. The distinguished pianist Gyorgy Sandor's "On Piano Playing" and Josef Lhevinne's "Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing" are good. Famous pianist Vladimir Horowitz's "Technique the outgrowth of Musical Thought" is excellent. Unfortunately, he did not write down a lot.

I also like to collect CDs and DVDs , listen or watch different pianists to play the same composition. I found that the music is different in different pianist's hands, especially the tone quality. I grew with the thought that physics and anatomy can and should be applied to piano playing and I started thinking to organize my thought and write it down.

Now I am retired, I have time to write little by little. I am developing a web site to teach the people to play piano with their brain not just the hands or the body, to understand why you should play in the nature's way not just mimic the teacher, to know what you are going to play not just whatever you can play.

For those who are interested please give me some suggestions and advices. Thank you!

My web site address is: www.modernpianoplaying.com

May M. Wu