Fall is drawing near, and there is always new excitement attached to the season. New beginnings, new students, new challenges.

This Fall will be particularly exciting with the “birth” of my new book, The Composer’s Landscape: the Pianist as Explorer; Interpreting the Scores of Eight Masters. Already there are scattered scheduled events around the book–a book signing at Book Revue, the great bookstore in Huntington, on October 15 at 7, a book party at Steinway in Melville, on November 1, Saturday at 4, at which I will play-a-little- talk-a-little, and we will eat-a-little, and a visit to a friend and colleague’s class at Juilliard to talk about the book. I expect the calendar will fill in as the weeks go by, and I am at once happy and stressed about the whole thing. Happy stress, but stress.

Will my hard work for the past two years meet with approval and understanding by the people whose opinions I value? Will I be happy with the end-product?

Usually, once a piece of work is done, I am thinking about the next project. But I have tried to put into words, everything I know and feel about performing the piano repertoire of these eight master composers. It is a culminative work, and it is a collaborative work, as I have harvested key chunks of wisdom from many of the great pianists I have had the fortune to interview for Clavier magazine, during the fifteen years I served as Senior Editor there. I believe the result is a rich compilation of ideas and suggestions, and what is more, I love the format and design of the book , with which, for the first time in any of my seven books, I had nothing whatever to do with—It felt like a loss of control in that sense, but the end-product is much better than I could have done myself.

So, I am sitting back on the porch, watching the first of the leaves begin to turn golden, and hoping there is some sort of symbolism there for good things to come…