is studio is quiet but for the soft whirring of the Sony Walkman as it rewinds the cassette tape. His earphones are comfortably in place; his pen is poised, ready to transcribe the music he is about hear for the umpteenth time. Although he has listened to this section of Thomas 'Fats' Waller's original recording of "Honeysuckle Rose" before, professor of music Paul Posnak plays it over and over, hoping to capture any detail that might have been missed.

"People need to understand, when they see and hear this music, how many hours go into transcribing each individual note," says Posnak, who painstakingly developed authentic, note-for-note transcriptions of the great solo improvisations of Fats Waller and George Gershwin from old, scratchy recordings and radio broadcasts. Prior to Posnak's work, these masterworks were never written down. His transcriptions of 16 of Waller's best piano solos spanning 12 years, from 1929 to 1941, recently were recorded and published in score form.

"It has taken me 17 years, off and on, to transcribe this entire body of work. You're leaving something for posterity; you are responsible to history and have to do it right," says Posnak, who directs the School of Music's Accompanying and Chamber Music Program.

Posnak's interest in early jazz developed during his years of graduate study at The Juilliard School. "I began to realize that there were all these incredible recordings with some of the most extraordinary performances of any music that I had heard, and they were only alive on a recording," he recalls. "Geniuses like Gershwin, Waller, and Jellyroll Morton had such immense musical visionary capacity. These American works are masterpieces, and they deserve to stand side-by-side with the European classics."

And so began a lifelong crusade of keeping the music alive.

e-creating these one-of-a-kind improvisational works, and then performing them in the style and technique of their original creators, requires enormous skill, versatility, scholarship, and dedication, all of which Posnak possesses in great abundance. A child prodigy who received a full scholarship to New York's Juilliard School of Music at eight years old, Posnak was served well by his training there.

"We had to learn counterpoint, keyboard harmony, how to read in different clefs, and how to analyze a score--when we were just kids!" he recalls.

Subsequent years of intense compositional training and developing a trained ear prepared Posnak for the work ahead.

"How do you reconstruct music that you cannot hear clearly?" he asks, referring to the sometimes poor recordings that he must decipher. "That's where a compositional background comes in. You cannot hear exactly what the chord is, but you can sense the overtones. You ask yourself, 'What would the composer have done? What kinds of fingering, hand positions, spacings, or voicings would he have used in that circumstance?'

"You get to know his style, his thinking processes, his tricks. You make an educated guess. All of a sudden something clicks, and you can really hear it. Instead of listening to something, you are now listening for something. And that's where the education and preparation come in," he says.

Posnak's degrees--bachelor's, master's, and doctoral, all from Juilliard--are in solo performance. He won First Prize in both the International J. S. Bach Competition and the Concert Artist Guild Competition, and was being groomed for a career as a solo concert pianist. But he "rebelled," immersing himself in chamber music, vocal accompanying, and coaching. After completing the first two years of doctoral study, he took six years off before returning to complete his Ph.D.

"I was being primed for a solo career and needed to find a way to establish more human connection in my own life," he says. And so his "informance" recital format was born.

With a chamber group he formed called Interaction Artists, Posnak toured college campuses, educating and entertaining audiences by blending performances with interactive discussions about music-making.

"The idea was to involve people in the cultural history of the music we were presenting," he explains. "We wanted to reach people in a much wider format than the usual recital situation."

They presented concerts in 36 states, and Posnak began playing all the chamber music and vocal literature he could lay his hands on. He provided audiences with historical information, anecdotes, and personal stories of the composers, interspersed with the music. He found himself pushing the boundaries of his creativity, delighting in the interactive aspects this format allowed for communicating with an audience.

The point? "We wanted people to have fun," Posnak says. "We wanted to explode the normal route of concertizing."

osnak branched out in other directions as well. He played for two years on Broadway with Leonard Bernstein's Candide and played a Gershwin show at the Smithsonian. He also coached singers and founded two chamber music series in New York. His varied interdisciplinary experiences led him to the realization that he needed to share his knowledge as much as he needed to perform. He returned to Juilliard on full scholarship to complete his doctoral degree, where he was awarded the Loeb Prize, the school's highest award. During this time, he also won First Prize in the Ars Vivus Chamber Ensemble competition in New York.

He went on to perform at the White House; at Carnegie Recital and Tully Halls in New York; at London's Purcell Hall; and in recital halls throughout Europe, Asia, and South America. He also worked with world-renowned vocalists, including Jennie Tourel and Luciano Pavarotti, and performed and recorded with many ensembles. Over the years, he has recorded solo and chamber music CDs for EMI Classics, Naxos, Musique Internationale, Stradivari Classics, Yamaha Disklavier, and Arabesque Recordings. He is presently in the midst of a multiple-CD recording project of American chamber music for the Naxos label.

In 1985, Posnak joined the University of Miami School of Music faculty from Kenyon College in Ohio, where he directed the music department for six years. He has been a featured artist on national radio broadcasts, and most recently, has collaborated with University of Miami communication professor Anthony Allegro on a film documentary about Frederic Chopin.

is informance format, which Posnak continues to develop, allows him to insert between his musical selections points of information that reveal aspects of the composer's life and the period's cultural history.

"Let's say I'm playing a work by Haydn," Posnak says. "I may ask the audience, 'When was Haydn born?' After we get the answer, 1732, I'll add, 'Who else was born that year?'--George Washington. I may say, 'You know, it's too bad they never got to meet each other because they would have had a lot in common. In many ways, they both were revolutionaries.'

"By relating an anecdote, the meaning of a date, or something about how the piece was constructed, you teach people a little bit about what to listen for in a piece," Posnak explains.

Often Posnak will combine his musical performance with video clips or other visual images. More than ever, he says, musical artists have a responsibility to guide today's younger audiences, many of whom spend more time playing video games than learning art and music in school.

Of his role in this process, Posnak says, "As a champion of American 20th-century classic and classic jazz music, I see myself as a pianist, a musical archaeologist, and a cultural historian. I'm helping to restore this stuff, putting it into people's hands as well as their ears in live concert format in a way they would never have heard before. This is the niche I have established.

"I'm not just a soloist, a chamber musician, an accompanist, a transcriber, a scholar, or a teacher," Posnak maintains. "I'm all of them. My aim is to be a complete musician."

hat began as a series of piano lessons developed into a full-blown collaboration between professors from the Schools of Communication and Music.

"Although I'd known music professor Paul Posnak for years, our friendship really grew when I began taking piano lessons from him," says communication professor Anthony Allegro.

Allegro spent years researching and, finally, creating a half-hour documentary film about the great composer Frederic Chopin and his life in Paris. The film features Posnak performing the music of Chopin.

"We shot the footage in Paris, then did all the performance photography in Gusman Concert Hall and in Paul's home studio," Allegro explains. "If you love Chopin and get to work with someone like Paul, it's so energizing. He's one of the best in the world."

Posnak and Allegro presented a kind of "super-informance" at the film screening at the Smithsonian in October 1999 that included a live performance by Posnak. A lively question-and-answer session followed.

"Some of the finest Chopin scholars in the world were there. It was completely interactive, a marvelous experience," Allegro says.

The two already have planned their next collaboration: Chopin in Warsaw.