Steven Blier + Adam Gopnik: From Ear to Ear

Join us for an event with Grammy Award-winning pianist Steven Blier, discussing his new memoir From Ear to Ear. Joining Steven in conversation is staff writer at The New Yorker Adam Gopnik. This event will be hosted at The Strand at Columbus Ave (SCA) at 450 Columbus Ave.

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“Witty, naughty, passionate, inspiring, brimming with insights, artistry, and love—that’s Steve Blier, and that’s this beautiful book. A miraculous musical life.” –David Hyde Pierce, Tony and Emmy Award–winning actor and director

While other kids were enjoying the head-bashing pleasures of tackle football, a freshly bar mitzvahed Steven Blier was inhaling operas and getting his first taste of accompanying professional singers. Beginning with impromptu piano gigs in the 1960s, Blier ascended to a dazzling career as an accompanist, teacher, and producer that has taken him to the highest reaches of artistic achievement. Today, Blier has partnered many of the brightest stars in music and thousands have fallen in love with his work via his acclaimed New York Festival of Song.

From Ear to Ear recounts his picaresque and unfailingly entertaining road to a successful career as a collaborative pianist, bringing to life his partnerships with iconic performers like Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Jessye Norman, Cecilia Bartoli, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and beloved mentors, including Alvin Epstein and Martha Schlamme. Drawing on his innovative work as a vocal coach and concert producer, Blier takes readers deep into his artistic process, revealing the intricacies of song interpretation, what makes certain songs tick, and what music has meant in his life and what it can mean in anyone’s. But Blier also tells a parallel story: his lifelong battle with a rare form of muscular dystrophy. Aided by his intense determination, as well as his wry sense of humor, Blier continues his life at the piano.

True to a musician for whom nothing is off limits, From Ear to Ear showcases Blier’s voracious musical appetite, dazzling wit, and the hard-earned lessons from a lifetime of performance. As Adam Gopnik writes in his foreword, Blier’s career and achievements are “genuinely heroic, a testament to the power of music.”

Photo credit: Carielle Doneson

Steven Blier is a Grammy Award–winning pianist, acclaimed accompanist, and co-founder and artistic director of the New York Festival of Song. He has taught at The Juilliard School since 1992 and lives in New York City.

Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1986. Over the past forty years, he has published more than a million words in the magazine, including personal essays, literary criticism, political reflections and reporting from abroad. His eleven books, many of which had their birth in essays written for the magazine, include Paris to the Moon, Through the Children’s Gate, Angels & Ages, At the Strangers’ Gate and, most recently, The Real Work. Called “the finest narrative essayist around” by Esquire, he has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism three times, as well as the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In 2021, he was named a chevalier of the Legion d’honneur, France’s highest civilian or military award, and in 2025 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He has lived in New York with his wife, Martha Parker, since 1980 – with a five year stay in Paris in the 1990’s – along with their children, Luke Auden and Olivia Esme Claire. He is also the librettist and lyricist of several works in the musical theater, including Our Table and A Love Song, with David Shire, Fairy Tale with Andrew Lippa, and the forthcoming opera The Swerve, with Stewart Wallace. His first one man show, The Gates, appeared for a week at the Public Theater in 2018, and his second, Adam Gopnik's New York, played for three weeks at Lincoln Center in 2025.

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