In the afterglow of an evening celebrating the music of Ursula Mamlok I walked around all day yesterday with rich thoughts and feelings about this extraordinary woman and her magnificent music -- too much, apparently, to permit a brief blog post.

An appreciation of what she has accomplished entails an overview of 20th-century composition. It always felt to me as if a conspiracy was threatening to take over the musical imagination of a couple of generations paralyzed by war and displacement. It sounds simplistic to say it was serialism, and I don't mean to condemn serialism as a technique, it was rather a kind of atonality applied to hearing. It is as if music, according to this movement, was to be written so as not to be heard.

Ursula was one of the few who could not go there. Her love of sound, of the classics, of the feel of tone, comes through beginning already in the 60's, when she was told that if she wrote "like that" she would never have a career. Well, she has had a career and, at 87, continues to enjoy excellent performances by a whole new generation of players who love her music.

If you don't know her music I encourage you to go in pursuit. A new CD, Volume I of her works, has just been released on Bridge Records. It includes a knockout performance by Heinz Holliger of her oboe concerto: moving and hilarious in the great tradition. Bravo, Ursula!

The trouble with writing music down is that it can't be written down. There are so many elements that cause a composition to arise, it would be impossible to track them all or even to imagine how diverse they might be -- as large as life would not be an exaggeration. Awareness of this level of creative reference should not be reserved for scholars.

Children can be made aware of specificity in sound; they can be made aware that one piano sounds different from another. This simple observation promotes curiosity. That's enough to last a lifetime: not answers, questions.

What makes a tone come alive is not all that different from what makes a word come alive. There are in music hidden clues that indicate the reference of tones to life sounds.

Sometimes we need these references to be pointed out to us as the sound referred to is not part of our culture. For example, the piano has a repeated F# in the Dvorak Dumky Trio. None of the other instruments is involved with that pitch at the time. I was told by my teacher, who was from Prague, that it was a tolling bell. Even contemporary Czechs do not recognize it.

For me this examples affirms the specificity of tones and tone references. It is not a foolish question to wonder where a composition originates -- why it is in such a key, centered on such a tone, why it drifts into this unlikely realm.

Yesterday I experienced a kind of Proustian moment in relation to specific sounds in Mozart piano sonatas. I recall as a child having pronounced reactions to specific sounds in those sonatas. The sounds I liked were mostly cadences in C Major, though in general I found that to be a "boring" key. There were some others, but not as consistently identifiable.

The agreeable sounds were surrounded by sounds I most particularly did not like. When they occurred I would turn the page. I played a sonata from beginning to end only on assignment, in which case I spent a lot of time holding my auditory nose.

Now, fascinated by the implications of these contrasting feelings, I am going back over the material, this time with an informed ear. I am astounded to learn the legitimacy of my child reactions.

The point I am making is that primary impressions are key to engaging the imaginative intelligence of a musical child. All the schooling in the world should reinforce, not diminish their integrity. Would that it were so.

Today I listened as my two teenage students made a Stravinsky duo come to life, literally, in their ears and in their fingers. It took some self-discipline on my part but I did not want to interfere by checking whether they were playing all the right notes. Working on their own, they self-corrected with each repetition while developing a clear image of how the music wanted to sound.

For me it was like giving them a promotion and a raise in pay to trust them to work through this difficult music with minimal interference on my part.

Fear is clearly a factor in the musical lives of too many people, mostly fear of making mistakes. If the mind has a logical involvement with tone as it clearly does with color, with numbers, and with many other aspects of life experience, then it would seem logical that musical people will no more play "wrong" notes than they will make missteps on a cliff-side path.

The trouble is that we learn notated music as the equivalent of a Fred Astaire dance step floor pattern. It isn't. Period. It represents, as Karl Ulrich Schnabel repeatedly pointed out, an ideal reading of a compositional proposition within which there is considerable leeway. It's just that we have been so frightened of error that we can't enjoy the range of possibilities that any line of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or Hindemith offers for our participation.

It took a long time to make the plunge, but now that I have ditched the "right note/ wrong note" school of piano teaching I find that almost all my students want to make music of their own. Coming naturally, it seems to affirm a source of individual expression that I would not otherwise know how to achieve. Knowing I listen attentively to their music makes them play all other music with deeper concentration.

Today I am all caught up in the implications of a brief exchange with a musician about tunings of keyboard instruments before the era of equal temperament - put by Ross Duffin (How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony and Why You Should Care) as 1916. This musician, who has perfect pitch, confessed that he can't really tell the difference between one temperament and another.

Do these minuscule differences matter?

It has long seemed to me that the piano is a kind of translating instrument: its pitch can be made compatible with all kinds of other pitches simply by respecting the specific ways in which instruments and voices tune among themselves and not getting in their way. It is ironic that so much early instrumental instruction is based on having children match piano pitch, when it should be the other way around: young piano students should be made sensitive to string and vocal intonation.

Recently I heard an a capella choir that was entirely out of tune with itself. The notes were all there and they were probably correct but, having been matched to piano pitch, they were entirely unconvincing.