NOVEMBER 2025
It was Thursday.
My 2nd-grade student stood at the piano next to me, his hand on the white keys in the upper register. We were improvising in minor—coming up with patterns and musical ideas. He played C-B-A spontaneously and it caught his attention.
“My ears were looking, but not my eyes!” he said with pride and amazement, tipping his ear toward the keys. His sandy brown hair fell across his blue eyes as he replayed the pattern.
What if we listened with our eyes and saw with our ears?
I've been thinking about this question for years. I remember my piano teacher posing it once: "Listen with your eyes… see with your ears"—the only thing I wrote down during my 2-hour lesson that day.
It makes you look at things a little differently. Suddenly, you have a new vantage point. What does this make possible?
I recently subscribed to Keith Sawyer’s Substack, The Science of Creativity. “Creativity begins with attention,” he wrote last week. “To create. . .means to be fully present, alive to the energy of the moment.”
He shared an interview he did with New York illustrator Carol Fabricatore (you can listen to the full interview here). In her work for The New York Times, she learned how to draw people in motion. “You’re not just drawing what you see,” she says. “You’re drawing the energy—the intangible and the tangible.”
It’s what you can’t see that makes the work all the more compelling. It’s reading between the lines. It’s recognizing that there’s more to music than what you see on the page. Your interpretation—your lens—matters. What you see and hear and feel and understand.
It’s not just a string of notes that makes a melody; it’s how you shape them. It’s not just a group of notes that makes a chord; it’s how it functions in a harmonic progression. It’s tone color and tonal tendencies, articulation and timing, balance and breath.
It’s decisions upon decisions.
“You have to summarize what is important to you about what you are looking at and what you are taking in and what kind of story or narrative you want to capture,” Fabricatore explained.
Whether you're a teacher, director, or performer, we're all making these choices—deciding what matters, what to emphasize, what story to tell. This is what it means to create. You’re communicating what it means to be human. And that matters.
Has a student ever surprised you with an insight about music—something that made you see or hear differently? I’d love to hear your story.
