Another habit in my students that I’ve been trying to combat has been “stuttered” practicing…Where the student plays a few beats, stalls and stutters, collects enough information to play a few more beats, before stalling and stuttering again. 
 
I’m okay with intentional pauses, in fact I encourage students to learn music in small, isolated, predetermined sections. But within that section, students need to keep going no matter what. This way, we start to get a sense of the choreography needed to play a piece. 
 
But of course most student stuttering at the piano doesn’t work this way. They simply sight read a little, stop, and sight read a little more. There’s no intentionality, there’s no organizing of the physical technique needed to internalize a passage. This kind of practicing yields incremental results. Intentional practice yields exponentially greater growth. 
 
I’ve been saying to these students: “The keys aren’t going anywhere. It’s our hands that have to figure out where to go. We only have 10 fingers but we have to convince our audience that we have 88. Practice so that you can trick your audience.”
 
Right now, of course, the music is tricking the student and it’s obvious to anybody listening. 
 

​A good crescendo is hard to come by. A good decrescendo is even harder. 
 
Most students will define crescendo as “getting louder”, and they intuitively know that that means you start soft. I’ve been emphasizing with a lot my students that the point of a crescendo is not so much the beginning or ending dynamic. It’s the ‘getting’ part. 
 
The joy of a crescendo is the journey from one dynamic to the other. 
 
The ‘getting’ isn’t a means to an end. The music is in the journey. 

Lately, I find myself telling my students: "assume your audience doesn't know anything" (this is an improvement on the original: "assume your audience is stupid"). 

Now I don't mean that you as a performer ought to look down upon your audience. Nothing high-brow or elitist helps anyone who's supposed to be an ambassador for their art of their ideas.

What I do mean is that you want to be absolutely clear to your audience what your musical ideas are. Something I've learned over and over again is that my musical ideas might seem clear to me, and I might think that I'm expressing them clearly. But usually those ideas have to be exaggerated for my audience to understand them.

Assume your audience knows nothing about classical music. Express your ideas in as big a way as necessary to make it abundantly clear to them what your musical intentions are, what story you're trying to tell.

​This is how we get an intentional pianist, someone who's artistry is communicative and engaging.