Ginsburg: Did you grow up in a musical home? Were you always musical?

Rosenberg: I've always been fascinated by sound. My brother started piano lessons when he was five or six. I was three or four. I would sit underneath the piano when the teacher came. She would begin by playing a little prelude, a little rhapsody on the piano, just to sort of establish a musical tone for the lesson. I was just completely overwhelmed by this experience — sit ting under the piano, being in the music. I did not speak at that age. I did not have words then. But I'd heard the word "God" around the dinner table and I figured that this feeling I was getting while sitting under the piano while she was playing her little bit of Brahms or whatever it was — that this was God. I was in God.

G: You've talked before about the concept of "the architecture of music". Is this what you mean, being in the music?

R: You can listen to the great musical traditions — the Gypsy tradition for instance, or the West African drumming tradition — and if you put yourself in that music, you will discover that the great artists and the great musics are specifically addressing the same questions. What I mean is that music has a way of defining our spiritual architecture, our emotional architecture. And because it is such a powerful thing, such a powerful experience, music is used in every part of our lives. It's used to accompany our changes in consciousness. It's used to accompany rites of passage. It's used to accompany pain and joy. It's a way to bring us closer to a true understanding of our true selves.

G: Let's talk about some more about your own musical education. Where did you go after you crawled out from underneath the piano?

R: I spent a good 15, 20 years realizing that I was something of a square nut in a round hole. Or a square peg in a round ... whatever. I was a little different than most people because I had grown up trained to play classical violin but I had this undeniable passion for blues music and ethnic music and all different kinds of music. I had this yearning for something that I wanted to hear but didn't hear anywhere. And so I began to play it myself. As I got older and began looking at what I had come from, I made a very interesting realization. It took me a long time to really fully understand the magnitude of my very early upbringing.

I was a child of the late 50's and 60's in the suburban milieu. My mother had four boys under the age of 5 — I was the second of the four. By the time my next youngest brother came along, we had live-in help. Mary Ella was from the deep South. She'd put us to bed at night with the radio station tuned to the clear channel stations of the South. So I would listen every night to B.B. King out of Memphis, to The King Biscuit Flower Hour out of Helena, Arkansas. I would listen to The Grand Ol' Opry and The Louisiana Hayride. Every Sunday morning she'd play gospel music on the radio, from the South Side of Chicago. So, I grew up having a full, solid dose of African American musical culture.

G: Piped straight out of suburbia.

R: In addition to that, I was also part of a fairly religious family and I grew up hearing the melodies of the great cantorial repertoire. We had a wonderful chazan who sang at the synagogue and these melodies were incredibly passionate and moving to me.

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