A Music I Cannot Name

Once a month I trek out to Park Slope in Brooklyn to hear sounds that I cannot identify brought to being by the events of the day, the weather, the people in the room, songs that I have heard hundreds of times, or all of the above.  The performer/improvisor is Rachelle Garniez, my daughter, whose work inspires a deeper understanding of what it must have been like to be Mozart than anything I ever learned or read about him.  For that is the point, reading or learning about is like dancing around Emily Dickinson's ring:

We dance around in a ring and suppose
While the secret sits in the middle and knows.

I go back again and again because I know that I will be listening on the edge of two chairs, the one upon which I am actually sitting, and the inner one on which I wait to be delighted, surprised, moved, discovered in a state of disbelief -- "Did I really hear what I think I just heard?"  Except that here there is no repeat sign.  Nothing is or was ever written down.

When I went to teach her to read music, that wise 8-year-old shrugged her shoulders and walked away, already in the middle of that ring.