I

am a Surabaya-born pianist, currently in the final year of my doctoral studies in music at the Royal College of Music (RCM), London.

As a musician, I also have a deep interest in other arts: how they can inform me about my performance practice, help me to be a better pianist by understanding the music more and becoming a better communicator to the audience.

Hence, for this doctoral study, my performance-research project is about '€œCreating new concert experiences via cross-arts practices for pianists'€.

I have been working on a piece of piano music by Olivier Messiaen and Claude Debussy (both are French composers but interestingly enough, both of them were highly influenced by other arts such as painting and poetry as well as by music from the East), written for a solo pianist.

For my performance-research project, I tried to perform those pieces of music not only as a solo pianist, but as a collaborative performance with a painter and an actor, making present the references to words and images in the music.

From this uncommon combination, I learned about finding common ground to communicate with people from different cultural and aesthetic backgrounds and sharing that beauty with many more people.

It amazes me how beauty can be communicated in different artistic languages; this certainly highlights, what I dare to say, the spiritual nature of a work of art that can touch all humanity. So many exciting things one can learn from other disciplines as long as one keeps one'€™s mind opened.

Maria Immaculata Setiadi
London