What is the essence of music? Most people agree that Beethoven's piano sonatas are musical, but try to define what makes them so, and you run into trouble. The best I can do is to echo Sir Kenneth Clarke when he says "I don't know… I can't define it in abstract terms - yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it." Clarke is talking about Civilization, an equally abstract and undefinable term. What is Civilization? What is music? I don't know, but I can tell you when I experience it.

There are times when I'm playing when things really start to work - when the performers and the audience come together into a unified whole and I know the music is right. At those times, I feel connected to something larger than myself. I find myself playing things that are technically more difficult than I can play when alone. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is music.

In the audience, there are times when I and the other listeners become absorbed in the music - when it touches us deeply, when I want to laugh or cry or jump up and dance. Personal distinctions melt away. Audience members find themselves collectively reacting to the music, and begin to participate in it, often in a very literal -way clapping or singing along. Music connects us, or shows us where we already connect. This is music.

Often, the sound of a car passing by on the road outside, or the sound of a typewriter in the next room will seem appropriate. The sound soothes, quiets me, gives me a solid sense of where I am and what my relationship is to the world. This is music too.

Record the sound of the car and play it back while a string quartet is playing, and the clash may be inappropriate. I get nervous. I put space between myself and the composer. Between myself and the performers. The performance becomes an intellectual experience, and I begin to define, to separate. Musique concrete is profoundly musical to me, but take it out of its natural context, and it no longer has that connection that I associate with music. The car sounds are natural sounds. Meaning, they are sounds that arise without premeditation - sounds that would be there whether or not someone meant there to be a sound. The string quartet is artificial - that is, it is man-made sound conceived and performed to express something of the mental and emotional state of the composer. Concrete music, put into an abstract context, ceases to be concrete.

I was once at a musical performance in an un-soundproofed hall. At one point, an ambulance screamed by outside, making a wonderfully appropriate counterpoint to the music, which happened to be a medley from West Side Story. In this unplanned, unexpected event, the sound of the ambulance retained its concreteness. Rather than being an intellectual construction, the music just happened. This is music.

I will begin to define music by saying that it expresses a relationship. Consider the words we use, words like harmony and counterpoint. Someone walks to the beat of a different drummer. we talk about discord between two countries. The language of music is full of comparatives, and the language of relationship is full of music.

The experiences I think of as musical are those that join me to things, to people, and to deeper parts of myself. The musical experience is one of connection.

The sound of a tree falling in the forest is an expression of its relationship to the ground. The person listening in the forest has a connection to the tree that may not have existed before the tree fell. Or, while the connection existed, he may not have been aware of that connection. The occurrence of the tree falling brings the whole forest into perspective. Imagine yourself in that forest. How would the sound of that tree change you and your relationship with the world? Is this music?