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MARK STEIL: Maria Schneider has been down the Grammy road before. She was nominated twice in the mid-'90s but didn't win. A friend once told her, don't get too excited about a good review because if you believe the good ones, you must believe the bad ones, too.

MARIA SCHNEIDER: It's the same thing with the Grammys. It's really fun. It's an excuse to buy a really nice dress and to fly out to LA and to see all those famous pop stars. It's a lot of fun. But you have to be careful about how excited you get about those things.

MARK STEIL: The glitz, the glamour, the awards, and even some of the reviews are nice. But Schneider turns to a different place for inspiration when she composes. It's something she's done since first starting on the piano in Windom.

MARIA SCHNEIDER: Music always helped me get to some kind of fantasy world. I used to fantasize as I played piano that there were these talent scouts that would drive by our house and that they had some sort of radio equipment that could hear inside the house and that they were going to hear that I was talented somehow and sweep me off to New York.

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For me, the most inspired place that I can be when I'm writing music is to not feel like I'm in a conservatory and trying to write music that's correct and interesting but to just go inside myself and go into that sort of alternative reality and then just make music while I'm mentally and emotionally in that place.

MARK STEIL: The starting point for the CD Allégresse was a commission for the Pilobolus dance company. Schneider says dance and dancers ended up coloring the entire album.

MARIA SCHNEIDER: The way we worked is I went into the studio, the dance studio, with them. And I would play some ideas on the piano. And then they would improvise. And as I saw these dancers improvising to my music, I would improvise based on what I saw. So it was this give and take. And as I did that, I noticed new things were coming out of my music. Instead of thinking of music as melody, harmony and rhythm, I started feeling music more as momentum and gravity, lightness, airiness, movement.

MARK STEIL: After growing up in Windom, Schneider studied at the University of Minnesota, the University of Miami, and received a master's degree from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. She moved to New York City in the mid-'80s and became an assistant to the legendary jazz composer arranger Gil Evans, famous for his work with Miles Davis, among others. By the 1990s, she had her own band, in the 1994 her first CD.

But she still remembers when music first inspired her. She was five years old. And her parents invited a newcomer to town for dinner. Evelyn Butler had moved to Windom from Chicago and was an experienced stride and classical piano player.

MARIA SCHNEIDER: She was a redhead, a very vivacious lady, would wear green muumuus and purple slippers, just very eccentric in the most wonderful way. And that's where life came into living color for me because I remember sitting there after dinner. She sat down and played. And all this intensity came out of the piano and just-- it was like her personality was just flying through the air.

MARK STEIL: Schneider told her mother she wanted to take lessons from that lady. The instruction helped steer Schneider to a composing career, because unlike most piano lessons, Butler not only taught Schneider how to play the keyboard, she also helped her break the music down to understand how notes build into chords.

MARIA SCHNEIDER: My very first lesson with her, she played a major triad, and she sang to me, bright the day. And then she played a minor triad, and she sang, dark the night, to show me that somehow, major is happy and minor is a little sadder because this one note in the middle moves down by a half step. And from then on, every piece I ever played, she made me analyze it.

MARK STEIL: There are other memories from Southwest Minnesota that color her music-- looking out her window on a bleak winter day at a grain elevator while her mother played a Chopin Nocturne on the piano, watching the shadowy night watchman make his rounds at a nearby flax plant which her father managed, the very sweep of the land itself.

MARIA SCHNEIDER: I do think that my music has the scene of the Midwest in it, the southwestern Minnesota with the open fields, the long roads, the sky where you can see forever, the nights where you can see the whole Milky Way. And just that open sound somehow translates in music to me.

MARK STEIL: Schneider has been all over the world with her band and plans more of the same in the future-- Scotland, Portugal, Italy. But along with the travel, there will be plenty of time for composing, time to retreat from the real world to a place where inspiration lives. Mark Steil, Minnesota Public Radio.

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