In today's New York Times several arts critics weigh in on the topic of Lincoln Center's recent White Nights Festival, purportedly about the spiritual in music.

When I received the festival's slick, expensive flier I could see immediately that it was a marketing ploy. Isn't all music spiritual? Does the hype insure greater likelihood of a profound experience? Do expensive graphics and heavy paper equal anything more meaningful than money?

So what's the real problem? It's that we are so bombarded with glitz and noise that we (some generalized, non-existent we) do not trust ourselves to find something beautiful on its own terms, whether it be our child playing in the next room or a lesser-known performer in a club downtown.

Stick your neck out: The next time you hear something beautiful tell the player that you enjoyed it: Don't assume it's a frequently conveyed message. It is not.

Yesterday I attended a memorial service for a person who was known as an extremely powerful, brilliant leader and organizer who almost always had the last say-so. I knew a different aspect of this person: I knew the tears that accompanied her reaction to beautiful sounds--tears that gave away how much she wanted music in her life--something she could not simply commandeer.

She proved willing to do the hard work of learning to feel the music without dissolving; learning to channel the feeling into generous participation together with others in a chamber music setting.

It was almost the exact opposite of what constituted her professional personality and accomplishments. How I admire anyone who will take such a risk.

What is so amazing about the voice -- about everyone's voice, whether trained or not -- is its uniqueness. One cannot help but respond to the intrinsically vocal: is the note high for me or low? is it comfortable or not in relation to the other sounds around me? These are the essence of vocalism.

Post-Baroque instrumentalists get that trained out of them. I think that's why so many good ones are going into early music. In Baroque music the voice comes first; instrumentalists are assumed to take their cues from the voice.

I guess that's the basis of my feeling that the instruments and the voices on the harmonia mundi Idomeneo recording are not united in their art. The instrumentalists play as though they understand the harmonies, not the words. I have always found this to be the real difficulty of getting singers and instrumentalists to make music together. In superbly crafted opera or lieder the words reinforce the vocalism of the singer, not the other way around. Instrumentalists, trained to treat all notes as interchangeable, often don't get it.

The singing on the harmonia mundi release of Idomeneo is outstanding: fearless, stylish, convincingly alive. It is unusual that vocal coloration was not sacrificed to the recording process. I recommend it highly.

We would all do well to pay attention to singers, particularly to how they make us feel what they sing. There is no truer instrument.

My research into Mozart's soundworld is leading to some very interesting and unexpected discoveries. I have suspected a connection between the natural horn and his sense of tonality, particularly minor keys. I suspected also a strong connection between the horn and his sense of vocal line. Then I found an essay by Paul Bryan about Mozart and Haydn's use of the horn. It mentions specific numbers in Mozart operas in which the horns figure prominently and with unique power.

Eager to hear this I wondered if there could possibly be a period-instrument recording of Idomeneo, the opera cited as making rich use of this instrumentation?

To my surprise, there is. Harmonia mundi has released a three-CD set of the opera with the Freiburger Barockorchester. Wonderful, thought I!

Actually less than wonderful.

The voices are superb--alive, wonderfully present in the force of their characters. But the instruments I find completely lacking in color, producing harmonies that have been subjected to modern homogenization. So why use period instruments?

Sunday afternoon I heard a performance that illustrated beautifully my point about chickens and eggs. This was a young string quartet -- clearly nice people, unpretentious yet serious in a very convincingly youthful way. There were no flaws in their work. None, really. Except that the first violinist played, from time to time, ever so slightly out of tune with the others. Okay: I can attribute that to the adrenaline of being the leader.

But there were no moments of real fusion inside of the sound. The drama was all technical, not native to the instruments or the compositions.

As the elderly gentleman seated with me put it: Too much drama; not enough heart." I maintain that the "heart" part is what children dream about. I certainly had vivid childhood dreams about musical elements, very specific elements--also nightmares. Their power has lasted a lifetime: indeed, has sparked a lifetime of curiosity and intent pursuit of its underlying mystery.

Chickens ... eggs ... The way our culture thinks about music is that it has to be learned, technique first. But technique, at least on the piano, is taught very much the way the old Fred Astaire dance charts used to try to impart the art of dancing to total klutzes who didn't have a clue. In case you have never seen such a chart let me attempt a description. It showed basically the floor plan of a step, with outlines of the left and right foot shoes of a man and a woman with dotted lines and arrows indicating ... you guessed it.

No trace of body, no indication of a rhythm. Just shoes positioned in a diagram that might show where to put the sofa in relation to the coffee table.

But it doesn't work like that. Impulse counts for more than 90% of it. Impulse and an instrument translates directly into sound. Start with that and there is meaning.

Start the other way and count the days until it dries up.