Yesterday a young student was sight-reading Mozart's Sonata in G, K. 283, the last movement. In it Mozart repeats a chord four times--an unusual chord, not particularly pleasant, but definitely conspicuous. Laughing, the student said it sounded like a car horn.

That could not have been the sound Mozart had in mind; but surely he had something just as specific in mind--most likely a noise from everyday 18th-century life.

It is hard to imagine what it might have been, but one thing is clear: we live in an extremely noisy environment. In the few moments between the end of the preceding paragraph and the beginning of this one I was aware of many pitched sounds: the beeping of a bus backing up, a humming motor under my desk, a droning airplane flying past, plus two noisy thumpings: the heat in the pipes and my building's elevator.

Is it far-fetched to imagine that composers sometimes write so as to make us more aware of listening?

I sometimes perform a very well-known piece for an audience of strangers. I particularly relish making such music come newly alive, especially as I have all my life had zero tolerance for hearing the exact same thing more than once.

It was interesting, then, to play the first movement of the "Moonlight" Sonata. Believing the fantasy aspect of the work to lie in its extraordinary tone/overtone mixes I play it fairly straight--in other words, I let the composition and the piano do the work. It was clear that the audience was listening on two levels: hearing the music as they knew it already and hearing this fresh reading.

Many years ago I played "Fuer Elise" for a 7th-grade class, who were then supposed to write reviews of the performance. I was severely taken to task by one girl because I did not do the dramatic crescendos indicated in her edition. Her teacher would never have allowed her to exercise the restraint specified by Beethoven in the Urtext edition. The girl was fascinated to see the difference and I remain fascinated by how much she cared.

Why are we so reluctant to grant a sense of humor to Mozart? We find so much that's shocking in his letters. Is it possible that that same quality is suddenly lacking in his music?

In a way one learns more about the spirit of Mozart from Chico Marx than from current concert behavior. His irreverence is brilliant and sadly almost unknown to the younger generation.

Today I was studying a Mozart piano concerto in the light of the orchestral voicing, particularly the French horn part. I came across a most unlikely harmony in which the horns, playing in octaves, play the tonic tone, which throws the whole exotic harmony out of balance. In all the performances of this piece I have ever heard that imbalance was never allowed to dominate the moment. If I were to conduct you may be sure it would!

Such things are always a matter of personal taste. But taste has to be backed up with a sense of the composer's skill in writing down exactly what he had in mind, whether or not it meets contemporary standards of good taste.

If exuberance and drunkenness release us from inhibitions, they release us also from hangups about technical perfection. Perhaps that's why some of the most difficult passages in music must have been conceived as expressions of these extreme states of mind and body.

I have suggested as much to players faced with these challenges only to be answered with a dull stare, as if to say, "You must be kidding." But what if Schumann is kidding? Or Schubert? or Brahms?

We take music much too seriously. Starting with the required "Practice!" and the required right notes in circumstances where good behavior is the only alternative, we find ourselves on a not-at-all slippery path to boredom --ultimately perhaps a dissertation, but not to musical exuberance.

I am fascinated by exuberance in music.

The other day I was discussing the natural horn with a total stranger at the Chamber Music America conference. This respectable-looking middle-aged man is a collector of horns and an avid amateur. He leapt instantly from talk of the horn to talk of drinking companions.

How likely do you think it is that some of Mozart's outrageous horn concertos were conceived in moments of drunken hilarity shared with his Salzburg pal Leitgeb?

Where does the composer get the idea of starting a composition? In the Mamlok concert last week it was pretty clear that she gets a lot of her starting ideas from nature noises, among which bugs and birds are prominent. She signals as much in many of her titles, like Grasshoppers, In My Garden, etc.

It is less clear with composers who do not give a verbal clue, Mozart, for example. I am at the moment completely fascinated with the centrality in his works of the French horn. When one stops to think that the horn in question is not a modern horn, but the very distinctive natural horn on which every single pitch is colored specifically it boggles the mind.

We have become far too inured to neutralized pitch. To paraphrase a song I recently heard: "Just because you can play all the chromatic tones with equal efficiency doesn't mean you should."