With Your Own Two Hands by Seymour Bernstein

Excerpts from "With Your Own Two Hands" by Seymour Bernstein
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GROUNDED
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Like how you pivot when you play basketball. If you pivot to the right, you anchor weight of body on right foot, freeing your left foot so that you can pivot right.
When playing piano, the weight of your arm is anchored by means of one finger which instantaneously frees the other fingers.
->Grounded within one hand; eg. hold down thumb and other fingers play
->Grounded between hands; eg LH hold down bass octave while RH running passage.

MEMORY
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"The study of music contributes to the exercise and acumen of the mind"
-Athenaeus
(referring to memorization as one of the many educative features assoc. with the disciplines of music)

Leaps- try practising with eyes closed

If you play too carried away with emotion, feelings were not sufficiently supported by reasoned analysis and playing lacked security. (if suddenly you look at your hands and ask yourself what's next, that will induce a memory lapse) On the other hand, if rely heavily on analysis, lose contact with sublimity of the passage and end up tedious and boring.
Therefore, confront the keyboard in all its shiftings of pattern without ever losing touch with emotional involvement in the music. Only then would you have earned the right and the confidence to look up or away from the piano if you wished. Musical spontaineity can be sustained only by that synthesis of thought and feeling that makes eye contact with the keyboard or even lack of it, immaterial.

Mark of a great performance

....a performer's greatest trick: to make the simple ones look complicated and the complicated ones look simple. Because any truly great performance is almost as much showmanship as it is actual talent, .....

Responsibility towards music

With Your Own Two Hands, Seymour Bernstein, pp203-205

To emerge victorious in an activity as demanding as performing requires great courage and a superhuman organization of one's self.
"It is a grave responsibility to love a composer so much as you love Schubert. You have no other recourse then but to practise diligently so as to give back this love to others through performing." These words had an immediate lasting effect on my pupil, for they gave him a reason to perform that made all other considerations seem of secondary importance. Responsibility to music, he realized for the first time, had to take precedence over all else - even fear. And by taking up this mantle of responsibility, my pupil was able to confront his own talent in such a way that his fear came to seem trivial to him when compared with his love for music. With this in mind, he was soon able to commit himself to a perormance and prepare for it with the kind of motivation that led him to cope with his fear successfully.

What matters most is that you practise as hard as you need to in order to serve music as responsibly as you can.