Alisa Yuko Bernhard is a pianist and researcher based in Sydney, Australia. She completed her Bachelor and Master of Music in piano performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she was a student of the late Bulgarian pianist Nikolay Evrov; her Masters dissertation “The Pianist’s Freedom and the Work’s Constrictions: What Tempo Fluctuation in Bach and Chopin Indicate” (2017), on which the present paper is based, engages with the musical work’s ontological status. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate, exploring the relationship between music and dance with a focus on the subjective experience of dancing/musicking.