As the new year begins I look forward to an important retrospective concert on January 13 honoring Ursula Mamlok, a dear friend, still vigorously composing at the age of 80+. Her music reflects her life: the struggle to find and assert an identity in a highly competitive field; and the love of music of the past and of particular composers and performers whose lives and work have touched her deeply. She is unabashedly joyous in her celebration of life and love. Thinking about how trite those words have become, let me rephrase: in her celebration of both the public and private aspects of music.

A younger musician once put it succinctly: If she were a man she would be famous.

When and where does a composition begin? The announcement of a mixed media new music performance just arrived in my inbox. It will feature grand piano, electronics, double bass, a drum set and some other things. The performance takes place a week from now; I have already begun to hear it.

In response to my question as to whether there is a composition that they have trouble starting, one thoughtful player responded that he had never noticed. A younger player in the same room immediately cited a Mozart Sonata in F.

The corresponding question is when the work ends. In some cases it never does.

Define attentiveness. It may be easier to consider its opposites:
What we experience when we go into a chain drug store
Our reaction to the rhythms of overheard anonymous iPods

The most vivid example of attentiveness that I recall is a three-month-old listening for the first time to a small bell.

Consider that bell: Clearly the sound starts when the bell is struck. But when does it end? Does it ever end?

The possibility of endless vibration keeps us listening even to silence when the bell is no longer actually sounding.

There seems to be an oxymoron in yesterday's post: How can a percussionist's performance be moving? Isn't emotion in music associated with vibrato, rubato, and maybe some other -ato's, many of which have come to mean excuses for self-indulgent distortion?

The riveting part of any performance is attentiveness. A good percussionist has to be mindful of every vibration in the air so as not to disturb, but rather to enhance it. I wonder what would become of traditional music if the players of pitched instruments were less self-absorbed in their beautiful sound and more connected to the overall sound environment.

Some of the problem lies in laziness. Rather than attend to every note in a harmony as having potential for development (it often happens that a fine composer will specify different note values for each chord tone, as if to call attention to that potential) we homogenize easily-identifiable harmonies, making them conform to examples we already know. I know how to play a G major chord, so why should I bother paying attention to this one?

I know this flawed thinking all too well, having been guilty of it myself.

In today's New York Times there is a long article about the rise to prominence of percussionists. In it Allan Kozinn gives a summary overview of the orchestral scene over the past 200 years or so, describing how it has been dominated first by violinists and then by pianists. Now it seems percussionists have come forth from their position behind the pitched instruments to occupy the conductor's podium in symphony concerts and a great deal of the stage in chamber music concerts, hardly one of which takes place without a work that calls for vibraphone, marimba, tuned gongs and/or all manner of struck instruments.

I have long been a great fan of percussion instruments and use them routinely in my teaching. They arouse awareness of pitch as most broadly defined -- or rather undefined. Nothing stimulates awareness of overtones as does a bell, gong or chime. Out of that broad awareness comes consciousness of the minutest aspects of discrete pitch.

That the two are closely related is evident in the extraordinarily focused listening characteristic of good percussionists, resulting in exquisite ensemble musicianship--some of the most moving I have heard in recent months.

This is about a special kind of listening, the kind that comes via the printed word. Ten years ago I published a little book called What Might It Mean? An Uncommon Glossary of Musical Terms and Concepts for the Stuck, Bored, and Curious. It received glowing praise from Leonard Michaels, whose short stories I knew from The New Yorker magazine.

What I did not know about Mr. Michaels was that he was a scholar of the English language as well as of literature and life (Michaels died in 2003). The same friend who had recommended that I send Michaels a copy of the book gave me for Christmas Michaels' Collected Essays. My reaction after reading two of the essays: No academic degree could mean more to me than having been taken seriously by such an extraordinary sensibility.

If only musicians who claim they know how to read music read notation the way that man read words!

Yesterday being Christmas I had occasion to enjoy two things about a familiar carol, Joy to the World by Handel.

First: I will always cherish the one time in my life when the organist correctly observed the dotted quarter note -- not half note -- on the word "king." It not only answered the question as to why that note value never appeared in the tune as "everybody" sings it, but it also most splendidly picked up the entire melody.

In response to what must have been threats over losing his employment this error in judgment was never repeated, except in my head every time I sing the carol.

Second: The singing was followed by an improvisation on the tune using an invented scale. A daring young assistant organist (not the same one of Enjoyment #1) rendered a trumpeting chromatic take on the carol's descending major scale. He used a scale so inventive that, though it would be difficult to reconstruct it note-for-note, no one who heard it can possibly forget its exuberance.

I wonder what kind of official feedback he received.