There's more than one way to do it
It’s taken me several decades to come back around to the idea that there’s more than one way to do it, as far as classical music is concerned. The voices from my classical music education reverberate through my head whenever I sit down at the piano. Is that an Urtext edition? You’re playing an articulation that’s not in the score! Is that metronome marking real? Why aren’t you doing the right dynamics? It’s enough to turn anyone into a big ball of neuroses. So much of classical music preparation revolves around being true to the score and having an authentic performance practice, not to mention the often repetitive and laborious work that it takes to perform something like an etude. An unspoken goal of these rituals is that if the composer were alive today (they’re often not!), they’d somehow approve of our interpretations. I’ve sometimes felt stifled by being a classical musician. In fact, I took a long break from classical music to get a PhD in computer science and work in technology