“INTO THE MUSICIAN’S WORLD –

SHARING THE SPIRIT”

A comprehensive musical introduction to the concepts of these seminars. The powerful connections between composer, performer, and listener bring us in to the nature of sharing music. Listening well is a combination of focuses: concentration, getting the mood, an emotional connection with the wordless language of music and what it is doing.

We explore the personal aspect of playing, making an instrument “speak,” allowing the music to express something. We always return to the source of hearing the music itself, to touch on these necessary aspects of a more meaningful listening experience.

Differing classical styles are drawn from, with music by Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Ravel, and Prokofiev, and others.

With pianist, Rollin Wilber.

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a note from the performer:

When we use words to describe music, in a way it can stop some of the magic of the unspoken meaning of music communicating to us. What I want in these seminars is for us to accept that and try to go beyond what may be a natural resistance on some of our parts, so that our words, or yours, do not stop the music, but instead, through our embracing this concept, keep opening doors to our insights and thoughts, with the goal of coming closer to something in the music that conveys meaning for us, wordlessly.

If we can trust ourselves to intend to do that together, listening with an open mind to fathom and to learn, we perhaps can explore music itself, its own, actual way of communicating; its wordless language. We can ponder what we hear in relation to a range of thought about nearly anything – the composer, the times, various forms, styles, human and musical intentions large or specific. We can then apply all this into a fabric of being, into our consciousness, creating a ”state of mind” for listening, so to speak. Then with the sounds we hear today and elsewhere, a phrase of music, changes in mood, colors, sensualities or poignancies of feeling, we could perhaps reach an agreement on the universality of their effect, that the music has “said something” without words, even if we cannot completely define it.