Music is communication and indeed, should be different each time we play. Every day we are a different person. Every time you sit down at the piano you carry different baggage, different dreams, different emotions, different physical awareness and different emotional and intellectual attentiveness. Indeed, our performances should not be carbon copies each time we sit down. I think we do a disservice to the art when we attempt to set it in stone.
If you sang Happy Birthday to your sleeping baby, your deaf grandmother, to someone you didn't like, as a solo, with a group, in a living room or in a noisy bar, on a stage, you would sing it differently because you are a different person to each circumstance and space and time.
But, you can train yourself to enter into the moment on command. Your questions is over two thousand years old. It is called Kaddosh or loosely translated, entering into the holy. In the bible, whether you beleive in it or not, Isaiah in a dream ascends to heaven and witnesses the most glorious moment of his life, hearing a multitude of angels singing Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. That was his Kaddosh moment. A moment he woke up with and lived with the rest of his life. Many of us have had moments and events that have changed our lives.
You too, if you are aware and can study the moment, your emotions, your body or, the overall feeling, then you can call upon your Kaddosh moment in an instant. If you have ever been to church and the priest says "Lift up your hearts" and the people respond "We lift them up unto the Lord," THAT is supposed to be a Kaddosh moment. Most people just regurgitate the words as if it were a script but, that is the moment we are called to enter into the Holy. Most don't. We don't even know it happens or it was supposed to happen.
So, you don't need to get into a zone if you present your music in the zone you are currently in. Then, each performance is new and fresh for both you and your audience. Not to mention, as you grow as a musician, human being and as a technician, you would never want to revert your music back to a lesser previously admired zone.
Music is finicky. If we don't own our technique, our playing will be different each time we sit down which detracts from our brain as we attempt to correct technical flaws on the fly and we lose emotive focus, more tension creeps in, more brain detraction . . .
So, find various Kaddosh moments in your life, remember them and recall them in an instant. They may include the birth of your first child, a yes to a proposal, climbing a mountain, hearing a multitude of angels, watching a sunset.
Mine was attending a music convention with 5,000 musicians and at the opening ceremony there was a 8-5-8-5 of tympani, a fanfare of trumpets, a harp let loose a six octave glissando, a cymbal crashed, an organ roared in with huge 32' bombards in the pedals, dancers/banner wavers/thurifers all sashayed in doing their thing, dancers carrying huge clay pots of water twirled in and poured them into a pool up front as a waterfall erupted from the dais, a 400 voice choir processed in and the conductor turned around and cued the assembly to sing. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. It took me two verses to compose myself.
Every time I perform, I call upon this moment. With my day's baggage. Now, go lift up your heart.
