There are things that distinguish dance from soccer: Everyone appreciates athleticism--no one more than I. So why go to watch people move around unless they are competing with someone or at least trying to score a goal?

Music is rather like that. I consider it a thought form as well as an art form. Once established as a thought form an individual is free to do with it whatever they desire: incorporate it into a visual or literary imagination, perhaps, or sight-read all of everything. If someone wants to work on technique, whether composition or performance it is a private choice until a public commitment is made--i.e., the decision to do it for money or for a job or for some other contractual arrangement.

Until then, why not treat it as a form of thought like any other? Well, maybe not quite like any other!

How can Boulez be a pre-cursor to Schumann?

It is a question of the bias of listening. If we listened --just listened -- we wouldn't need to care about whether a piece of music is tonal, atonal, post-tonal, or pre-tonal. We would simply respond to what we hear; the sounds would have or not have meaning. The experience might be likened to my reading Finnegan's Wake, an experience I enjoyed thoroughly last year and am currently repeating, in fact; but please don't ask me to explain it.

We shouldn't have to know anything at all in order to listen.

Listening to performances of music by Elliot Carter, Brian Fennelly, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and Robert Dick last night convinced me that a lot of contemporary music seeks to return us to that pre-tonal mode of responding to sound.

Such music is called post-tonal by theorists, but I think they have it backwards. Only people who were devoted to the strictest tonal orthodoxy as setting the standard for what is meaningful would concoct such a notion. In fact, as has been pointed out by psychologists for decades, there are millions of tones; it is entirely arbitrary that seven or nine or twelve have been isolated for us to consider legitimate.

Now here comes a music that can be listened to without a textbook. The Boulez sonatas for piano are like precursors of Schumann's wildest pianistic fantasies. Robert Dick's Heat History is primordial singing and jazz all mixed with the flute's highly recognizable points of tonal reference but skateboarding rings around us all the time.

Such revelations are to be heard at the Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance June 15-23 at Mannes and at Le Poisson Rouge. Check it out.

Some of my greatest joy in teaching comes from the sight-singing groups I lead. All a cappella, we concentrate on tuning, not according to any absolute pitch, but as they did it in the old days--until the late Baroque era, at least--just according to where the voices lie.

Not only do I derive great joy from these groups, but so do the people who sing in them, some of whom have had quite a bit of musical training, others not at all. The point is that the essence of melody lies in the tension of linear motion against harmonics and that anyone can learn to tune the harmonics of tones.

Some of these people report back to me that when they tell musician friends that they are taking a class in sight-singing the musicians groan and commiserate: "Oh, you poor thing!" or "Why on earth would you want to do that!"

I blame over-emphasis on the piano, an entirely unvocal pitch source, for these negative responses.

Yesterday my two young four-hand-duo students were struggling over a bar in Schumann's Trauer: a disaster, every time.

What happens in that bar? There is an F#, then an A-flat, and a B-natural. (The piece is in F major.)

I asked them to consider an analogy to such mucking about with the very tones that establish the identity of the key. One suggested it was like having lung surgery.

I'm not sure I would have chosen such an extreme comparison, but he was identifying change to the vital core of the key. For a person with a sensitive ear that would be like walking on a fault line--surely not a pleasant experience.

The question arises whether this young man's ear is too sensitive. I reply with another question: Was Schumann's ear too sensitive?

Better than this it rarely gets: A room full of people, seven with instruments--a motley assortment, and a dozen or so singers, also fairly motley, gathered for an annual reading of Bach Cantata #4, Christ lag in Todesbanden and of Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary--two of the greatest works of choral literature with instruments.

What made it wonderful was the agreement of intention of everyone in the room. No trace of snobbery or pretension (some people in the past had complained that it wasn't professional enough for their standards). This music is all about meaning and it is conveyed directly in the music itself, even without the text.

What was the conversation about afterward? Listening. And, no, I was not even in the room as that topic arose and was being explored.

Yesterday saw a major musical event: the arrival of a new instrument--actually a new, old instrument, as it is a reproduction of an 18th-century natural French horn. What a sound!

On this instrument every single pitch is colored with a timbre all its own relative to the natural overtones of the horn. Some of the tones are downright hilarious, others deeply poignant--very like a voice.

Perhaps that's why Mozart loved it so much. I have the feeling it colored his sense of pitch in all his writing, even for piano solo.

How mechanical we have become in relation to C-flats and such!