Beginning next week I will present a series of three informal afternoons at the piano, in what will be more performance art events than recitals. The idea is to stimulate audience awareness of the piano as a young peoples' invention -- which it would have been had it been invented after, rather than before the Industrial Revolution.

The focus of these events will be the ear, as it always should be in a performance of music, but all too often isn't. The ear is fast--really fast. But because we live in a culture of too much sound, a lot of our ear-energy is spent tuning out rather than tuning in. Being tuned in means being rapt in the aura of sound that makes every one as magic as the tinkling of a bell or of the triangle in the orchestra.

If you are interested in more information please get in touch via email: nancygarniez@tonalrefraction.com. It would be great to see you there.

What it all comes down to is that listening is an activity but an extremely complex activity: difficult to observe, difficult to cultivate, difficult to articulate.

I read descriptions of aural skills required at various levels in music schools and I am puzzled. To what extent are these truly aural skills and to what extent are they verbalization skills? These are two rather different things.

My young improvising student has remarkable aural skills that he cannot verbalize. But why should he have to? I cannot imagine that the verbalization would enhance the sensitivity of his listening since it entails an intellectual bypass, which involves slowing down the auditory response.

If I compare his listening to my own I notice that my listening to notated music (Beethoven sonatas, for example) is filtered by a visual/verbal process that identifies the sound before I hear it. I cannot imagine that that corresponds to Beethoven's mode of hearing. If anything, the notation of conventional harmony is but a portal to a richer, fuller auditory experience made distinctive by the precise placement of black keys in relation to white, low pitches in relation to high, and so on. It has taken me years to catch on.

One of the young people with whom I work has been improvising since he began lessons at 7. To get him right into the heart of the matter we start each lesson with improvisation. This has caused me to pay attention in new ways.

The composer whose works for piano are most clearly evoked by these improvisations is Beethoven--not that his improv sounds the least like Beethoven's music on the surface of things, but the impulse to move within a field of resonance is identifiably similar in this young man's playing as in particular passages in Beethoven piano sonatas.

Yesterday the improv focused on black key resonance. As we segued into the Moonlight Sonata first movement I was stunned to hear his "wrong notes" which were all consistent with his own improvisations, and which signalled specific responses to the overtone mix in play at each moment. (Here it must be pointed out that I take Beethoven at his word, and have the piece played "senza sordini," i.e., with a touch of pedal throughout so that overtones mix and clarify as they accumulate.

What I heard yields a more dynamic understanding of the work than visual score analysis. My training, heavily biased in the latter, still makes it difficult for me to play anything but a definite F# minor chord when I see one. His improvisational impulse produces a subtle mixing of the A natural with the clearly sounding A# overtone of the root F#.

I learn so much from this young man's pure ear.

Among my more pleasurable activities is teaching small groups of people to sight-sing in tune. You might say that tuning, whether vocal or instrumental, is what I do. I am fascinated by all the various aspects of tuning that affect musicians and listeners alike.

I am struck by how different it is to tune voices singing a cappella than to tune instruments. An instrumentalist reading music uses the notation as a kind of navigational map: you learn the instrumental equivalencies of the dots on the lines and spaces, then you master the physical coordination that produces an appropriate sound.

But in singing intonation is a function of vocal resonance and memory almost more than anything else. If you listen to Renaissance vocal counterpoint well sung, as I make it a point to do on a regular basis, you notice that there is almost always a common tone sounding -- that is, a single pitch traded off between the voices, reliable, stabilizing. It is the principle on which singing works.

If you are curious to pursue this further and if you are in commuting distance of midtown New York, I am starting a new group. If curious send me an email.

A recital by a serious, thoughtful and accomplished colleague is always a great delight. Yesterday was such a performance by Margaret Mills. She performed one of the great piano works of all time, The Suite Bergamasque by Debussy, which includes the famous Clair de Lune, one of the pieces that was almost done to death when I was a youngster. This suite has the capacity to utterly change one's approach to the piano, to rhythm, to harmony and a bunch of other similarly elusive elements. Mills gave it its due measure of attention and I was delighted.

She then played three Preludes by Ruth Crawford, one of my heroines. Fantastically difficult works, wild in every respect. I was suitably impressed.

These were followed by some "Picturesque Pieces" by Chabrier which I had never heard before. Beautifully played, they aroused my curiosity to look these works up for myself. A better result one cannot ask for.

Look her up at www.margaretmills.com. An interesting woman.

Today I asked my two students who work together on piano duets what they felt was their biggest achievement after all these years of music study. The younger (16) specified her ability to understand the sense of what she plays. The older (21) named his ability to keep going even though there are errors.

These responses pleased me a lot, since they speak to precision and comprehension. Nice to feel one has access to those things while still a young student, I would say.

Another performance of new music last night, composed by Sebastian Currier. Much about his work was genuinely engaging: I liked especially a Sonata for Violin (Miranda Cuckson) and Harp (Jacqueline Kerrod). It had all the instrumental intimacy I crave and rarely get from the early Mozart piano / violin sonatas. It was wonderful to hear the silence this piece and its performers commanded in a large-ish hall with a sizable audience. There was a most satisfying range of drama, sheer instrumental beauty, lyricism and virtuosity. Naturally I was reminded of Debussy's splendid insight that the harp is the new piano.

More bravura and a larger ensemble (I believe 12 players) performed a rousing Piano Concerto. Alternating passages calling for unrestrained athleticism with more restraint in the texture, there was no opportunity for the mind to wander in either piece. The soloist was Christopher Taylor; the Argento Ensemble was conducted by Michael Galante.

The final work was the premiere of a work combining electronic feeds with live playing. Here I took issue with the proposition underlying the piece. Though at times Currier succeeded in making me listen "for" rather "to" the music -- the kind of listening I most enjoy -- I felt that, on the whole, the tracks of body sounds, including laughter, hiccups, a sneeze, etc., detracted from my total engagement in a musical event. Currier acknowledges the connection between this composition and film. I don't much go to the movies these days, maybe that's the problem.