Last night a warm-hearted group of musicians gathered to read informally two Bach cantatas for the Advent season: No. 1 (Wie schoen leuchtet der Morgenstern) and No. 140 (Wachet auf!)

Without an understanding of the theology of the season this music is simply difficult. The theology of Advent has to do with the unexpected: something is going to happen, we know not when exactly. Thus the rhythmic conundrums, the long rests, the sudden bursts of energy. The difficulty is still there, but it takes on a human feel which altogether transforms the experience of singing and playing.

The subtle voice leading of a Bartok cadence (in which the middle voice becomes the bottom voice, while the bottom voice "leaps" to its overtone an octave higher, becoming the top voice, and the top voice becomes the middle) reminded me of a sleeve I saw over thirty years ago.

It was on a jacket worn by Jean Louis Barrault in a production of The Marriage of Figaro (the play) with costumes by Yves Saint Laurent. There he stood, center stage, in profile to the audience, his arm relaxed at his side, the sleeve perfectly draped without a crease or wrinkle. Breathtaking. Then he bent his arm at the elbow. Still no disturbing line. Even more breathtaking. I will never forget that sleeve.

Well-performed voice-leading should be like that, don't you think?

As if on schedule, a beautiful instance of singularity occurred at my piano yesterday afternoon. A young girl learning to read music with comprehension--that is with punctuation (articulation) and dynamics (tone of voice) inherent in the music rather than pasted onto neutral notes--played through a song in Bartok's For Children, Vol. I. To my surprise she preferred the "eerie," "peculiar," harmonization (her words) to the more conventional one.

Her reactions, her access to descriptive vocabulary, and her delight in the sense of connection to the piece--all of this represents tremendous progress toward experiencing mastery.

Too much music pedagogy has as its goal making the young learner feel the opposite.

I wonder how much that is based on the teacher's own removal from a directly passionate experience of music, which might lead to a belief that the only way to hold a child's attention is to bind them in slavish obedience to some incomprehensible standard.

Apologies for missing several days - sometimes things pile up in unexpected ways.

I am thinking a lot about singularity, particularly how out-of- sync it is with the prevailing wind approach to culture. That affects everything we buy, think, foster in our children and in each other -- everything.

What happened to it?

Why is it like sticking one's head into a guillotine to hatch an idea that doesn't conform to the accepted norms? I find myself in this odd position of having had a strong influence on the singular lives of quite a few individuals, some of them professional musicians, and yet with my approach singularly unvalued by music school administration.

Odd, isn't it?

A long talk with a retired art teacher drew out the observation that competitiveness is built into music study from the earliest levels while it is missing from art study.

She remarked that depth is apparent in children's artwork even at an early age. Very often parents do not discern it and opt to train the child's facility. The counterpart to me in piano study is the absence of ear-awareness/touch that goes with competitive piano playing. Don't the parents hear the hostility? It is the first thing I notice. I always wonder how long will that child's musical life will last.

I once had a young student who played like that after a bad day at school. I would change places with her and do some playing myself. A few minutes later she got the point: Music is a two-way street on which the listener is to be respected as much as the player.

Some people accuse me of doing music therapy. Music therapy assumes a norm of hearing and response to music. But I do the opposite in that I encourage each student to listen on their own terms and to develop the sense of mastery that comes with satisfying one's own ear.

Today the young woman who is a master dressmaker had trouble playing her Bartok piece fluidly. "I can do it at home," she said; "why not here?" The answer is analogous to making individual stitches in hand-sewing; she knows well how hard that is. It is much more difficult to recognize as "the same" a composition played on one's home piano and played on my beautiful grand.

I find it incredible that she expresses nuanced touch dealing with consonance and dissonance; that she is moved by the piece to extend it with her own material. I find her observations nothing short of masterful and they teach me a lot about the music and about my own hang-ups about playing the piano.

The list of pieces with dauntingly simple beginnings got a bit longer yesterday when I sat down to actually note their titles. Notable among them is a piece I do not dare play, to this day, certainly not in public and almost never in private.

Its opening is, to me, sheer anguish. It is the Mozart A minor Piano Sonata. Various recorded performances of its first ten bars or so were played at a recent conference as an example of how hard it can be to tell a real half-cadence from an elided phrase. By the time the sixth or seventh rendition was played everyone was laughing--everyone but me.

On paper it is utterly benign. Touching those sounds is like touching an open wound.