Sometimes I get the feeling that we are not prepared to believe that children are as likely to have something to say in tone as they are in words. Words and other pre-codified objects demand less of the listener than do sounds in their larger, unrestricted domain. But this larger, unrestricted domain clearly exists.

It is to this realm that Szymanowski's music refers--and Janacek's. Also Bartok, Schumann, Chopin...the list goes on.

By overly restricting our notions of what music refers to we have made it harder to receive uncodified messages except, perhaps, through the medium of instrumental virtuosity. By the time most young pianists have leaped through those hoops of pretend-fire all that usually remains is code without access to content, which then has to be pasted on.

I have been moved to notice the depth of the music native to my young students.

Last night I went again to hear Anderszewski in a second concert designed to get people to listen to the extraordinary music of Szymanowski. Again, a superb evening. This time this strange music was linked to Schumann's Fairytale Pictures for Viola and Piano as well as to Bartok.

The technical difficulties evaporate in the hands of such an imaginative player. We were all drunk, wistful, mourning and childlike together.

The piano is not one but a thousand instruments. Its sound lives on many levels and is responsive to such a myriad to touches and balances. Last night the master of them all played at Zankel Hall: Piotr Anderszewski in a program of Szymanowski and Janacek--not the usual fare. His playing is kaleidoscopic. When have I heard a pianist better match a violin's harmonics?

To hear such a virtuoso play pianissimo, barely breathing on the piano, is rare, very rare.

Last night's listening was of a totally different kind: the sizable audience seemed to be in on the code--a modernist code exemplified in three pieces written during the past year by serious composers. It is a tuneless and mostly toneless kind of modernism related only in one work to a process that I recognize, in that case, dance.

Oddly, I thought, the concert ended with Stravinsky's Les Noces, written in the 1920's, programmed I suppose as the prototype for modernism. But there we had decidedly human interactions in the voices, in the solo roles, in the percussion accompaniment. That made it sound and feel very traditional, indeed.

The other day I stood among some people listening intently as a young woman pronounced her name on the piano in what I can only describe as an awesome display of precise listening on everyone's part.

Maybe what gets in the way when we hear interpretations of written works is our need to pass judgment rather than to trust our own responses. Passing judgment involves imposing a measure of conformity to the experience, if you think about it.

I have been told by musicians in the jazz world that New York audiences are less spontaneous than audiences elsewhere in this country. The worry about not being "in" seems to keep us New Yorkers from having a good time.

According to a friend Wagner thought that Beethoven's improvisation was even more interesting than the pieces he wrote down. Was that really true or was it simply that Wagner paid better attention to things he had never heard before and knew he was never going to hear again?

What crops up over and over again is that music is an integral part of life, not an add-on.

Yesterday I received, as if from heaven, a recorded collection of informal chats featuring my childhood piano and organ teacher, Chauncey L. Griffith--a hugely influential populist-musician whose wonderful work inspired much of my professional life, especially my work with adult amateurs at Mannes College. (Chauncey died 30 years ago, so it really was from heaven.)

It brought home to me just how powerful the influences are when a drive as central as music is involved. How powerful the outcome, whether positive or negative, is a measure of the power of the drive.