Establishing orientation through listening, contact, and choice.

The Core is where we come from and where we return for our vitality, inspiration, and sustenance. We will explore and play with the essential skill of navigating the unknown capably by playing and experimenting with it through an intuitive approach to improvisation on piano.  

You will be introduced to tools to use regularly to notice your foundational creative connection and how to retune and realign it.

In this Core course, you will:

• nurture and become more deeply familiar with how to improvise in all 12 keys

• develop a physical and auditory sense of where you are at all times

• use sound as a reliable way to orient, ground, and respond

Choose the Core if you want a clear beginning, and a foundation you can stand on, on the piano and elsewhere, regardless of what comes next.

Sustaining practice across greater musical and perceptual complexity.

The Journey builds on the Core by zooming in.

You will learn to:

• clearly distinguish notes that create tension from those that offer release

• understand this relationship as the central engine of music

• nurture your capacity to stay present when tension arises

• apply specific, practical techniques that make this process intuitive rather than theoretical

This work is taught at a primordial, hands‑on level, so you are attending to the emotional impact of the different notes as you absorb the structures of harmony.

A sustained drum‑based practice for remaining oriented while holding complexity, intensity, or others.

This arc includes The Beat and continues into The Conversation, where rhythm becomes a reference point for responding, relating, and adapting.

Selected traditional rhythms may be introduced as stabilizing structures.. not as repertoire, but as support for continuity.

Musical focus:
Foundational improvisation & orientation through rhythm, over time.

You’ll be:

• maintaining orientation under pressure

• staying grounded while relating or responding

• using rhythm as a stabilizing reference across change

The Tune U Quest is a radically new approach to mindful awareness and creative expression.

You will engage with the piano in an entirely new way than you likely ever have before.  Instead of approaching it as an instrument for performing or "achieving" something, we will be using it as a way of learning how to renegotiate your relationship with your deep nature, with music, with your thoughts and inner voices, and with the piano, too.

In the process, you will regain your own sense of clarity and agency for experiencing yourself as you are deep down, and as a creative instrument on your own terms.  From this new vantage point of your own authentic self, you can experience everything you come across in new ways.

This program is a 12-month program that includes the 4 quarterly courses.

These 4 courses comprise the complete yearlong framework grounded in the 4 seasons, the 4 directions of many indigenous traditions (incl the Cherokee here in North Carolina), and the 4 Paths of Creation Spirituality (laid out by Matthew Fox).

By incorporating these spiritual traditions along with many perspectives on personal, social, and political points of view, this program offers a way for you to T.A.P. the Flow of your own deep connection so you can bring your unique gifts more clearly, creatively, and courageously to this world that needs them so much.