The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Some people have told me that they think I have a gene that lets me hear, understand, and feel music the way I do, and they’ll never be able to hear it with the same intensity. I disagree. My secret? I listen to each melody, each harmonic shift (and no, I can’t tell you what that harmonic shift is, because I have no real expertise in music theory), every crescendo, pianissimo, and fortissimo as if a close friend is telling me something urgently important. Since it’s notes and not words, I find the meaning in the context: this passage only makes sense relative to what came right before it. One technique I find especially powerful in so much of the music of Franz Peter Schubert is what I refer to as The Silence After the Scream.

A few months ago, I had brain surgery to remove as much as possible of three tumors found in my brain. Those tumors turned out to be glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive form of cancer. It is incurable, though treatable. I am halfway through a 6-week course of chemotherapy and radiation. I don’t know what my future holds–or even how long that future will be. But none of us is promised tomorrow. This turn of events has helped me feel even closer to Schubert, who learned as a young adult that he had a fatal disease, one which claimed his life at the young age of 31. This knowledge colored his compositions from that point on, in starkly dramatic strokes.

In this blog, I will endeavor to let readers into the inner world of how I hear the music that is closest and most personal to me. It’s not that I have delusions of having ingenious insight into the great works of Western classical music. I’m a policy researcher and programmer. I am an amateur pianist (emphasis on “amateur”). But I listen with all my heart, and thought sharing my thoughts and musical intuition might give people a new way of thinking about the music I write about, at least food for thought. And it will give my family and loved ones some insight into how my mind works, and how deeply felt my love for this music is.

So welcome to my music blog, Music Is Not In the Notes!