‘When Music Comes to Mind: Embodying the Performer’

Pianists routinely encounter a great variety of bodily and intellectual demands in preparing piano works for performance, but, even to this day, piano pedagogy and piano performance continue to labour under the inheritance of that part of Western philosophy which separates the performer’s mind – and its ability to reason – from perception and bodily movement.

Thus, on October 25th 2025 the fourth symposium at the Royal College of Music will seek to supplant this established belief, and show that while the mind is self-evidently the site of mental phenomena, it is also fully embodied.

While we welcome researchers from the medical, and scientific communities, and those teaching and studying in the conservatoires and institutes of higher education, we also wish to encourage those in the private sector who have a passion for playing and would like to learn more.

The London International Piano Symposium (LIPS) is committed to enabling world-leading research at the interface between science, medicine and the art of piano performance. This is a dynamic initiative in which we offer internationally distinctive and varied programmes intended to enrich the approach by performers, academics and pedagogues to performance itself.

The London International Piano Symposium (LIPS) is charitable organization (for tax purposes) with an educational platform, which is committed to enabling world-leading research at the interface between the sciences, medicine and the art of piano performance.

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