First off, apologies for having missed a couple of days. I am surprised to discover this, as it feels as if I am in constant conversation with you.

Principally I have been thinking about the invisible skill of listening. Respect for the voices of others gets high priority in this skill. It presumes that the others have something to say.

In terms of music that is a tricky issue. Getting it right means doing it like everyone else, no? Winning the competition means you do it better and faster, not that you are more interesting--heaven forbid.

Why does a child get "into" music? The next question might be where does a child get into music. Nothing improves familial relations more than privacy. Nothing fosters musical growth more than privacy. There are too many stories of family relationships gone sour over someone's practicing.

No wonder so many kids end up jamming in garages and basements.

Push-button access just doesn't work between people. Perhaps this is why, in my emphasis on familial aspects of music, listening to one another figures as a skill--perhaps a more important skill than playing well (according to some arbitrary abstracted standard).

One of the families from whom I have learned about this includes two children of very different proclivities and needs. They have grown in mutual respect and understanding by respecting one another's musical space. I dare say they have learned this from me: By not imposing an external standard on their activity, I have learned to respect that they each bring their own terms to their need for music. The full concentration that I bring to their playing gives them a working model.

They, in turn, furnish a model to the other families in the group. Nothing simple about it.

In this era of constant change we see more and more evidence that our ability to concentrate is being altered by the rapidity of push-button access to everything.

All the more reason, it seems to me, why our working definition of music should tilt in the direction of inner music rather than outer stimulation.

What is the source of that inner music? Interesting question; probably unanswerable.

The other day I heard an anecdote about a woman who experienced a pivotal moment in psychotherapy with a dream involving a scream. Two years after the scream/dream she became a singer. This does not surprise me in the slightest. All babies who scream have the potential to become singers, or at least musicians.

We do get interested in the noise we ourselves generate. What is the rush to supplant that source with more acceptable forms of sound? Pauline Oliveros has audiences go back to the sounds they were admonished not to make. Stravinsky refers to them in his autobiography.

In yesterday's New York Times was an article about having to disguise research on music as research on "complex nonlinguistic auditory processing." If ever there was evidence that music is alien to our culture this is surely it.

Now the problem is more subtle. Music is OK, provided it is written music. The purely oral aspects of music are not reliable. Thus, jazz is OK as long as it is by the book. That's why so much of it sound alike.

Musical sound exists simultaneously in several dimensions: in addition to time there are verticality and horizontality. Verticality is a function of overtones. These depend on timbre, among other things. A cappella voices, string quartets and certain well-tuned wind ensembles not in equal temperament produce clear vertical blends. The horizontality expresses tension against the vertical, an example of which is the so-called blue note of jazz, produced by the clarinet playing just slightly under pitch.

Some people believe that the piano furnishes a model of neutral pitch: I heard one conservatory graduate student say that the piano has "no overtones." How did he come to that conclusion? Or was he merely mimicking a non-fact he had been force-fed in an effort to avoid confusion?

I hear many pianists attempt to block overtones by humming loudly while playing or by playing always with the soft pedal. Not hearing the overtones is like being told to sit in the corner and not think about a big brown bear.

In one of my singing groups we encountered a problem common to ensemble music-making: One of the singers was singing the wrong vowel. While everyone else was producing Oh she persisted in Oooo. The sound was not in tune. It turned out she was obsessing about her attack. But the point in group singing is that there is no individual attack: a group intention produces the in-tune sound. How to agree on that? Simple: Look around; match the facial preparation of your fellow singers, and the vowel will come out in agreement.

To do this you have to tolerate losing control of your individual sound, in a way, of your individual will.

Concerts are full of such refusals to become part of a whole.

Then there is the opposite: equally upsetting. Too much blend at the expense of individual passion in linear playing. This requires some sophisticated musicianship and the appropriate setting. A string quartet is not an a cappella singing group.

The trouble with piano study based on technique only is that listening is ipso facto left to someone else. This is not only demeaning for the student, as it denies the validity of the student's own ear, but it is grossly unfair to the composer.

Yesterday I had the experience of playing a Brahms duo sonata that I have heard and played many times. This time I decided to take Brahms's notation seriously and vowed to respect his note values as indicative of actual sound "values," so to speak. It was a different piece.

Among the more potent discoveries: 1) Rests, as in Mozart, are most often not pauses but indications of interrupted sounds.
2) Bass notes in extremely low registers affect the intonation of the clarinet and the ear of the pianist. (Am I alone to have found them problematic all my life?)
3) Much of what we accept as standard Brahms interpretation is simply the result of not paying attention: this music is incredibly multi-layered.

Boredom or inattentiveness, as usual, proved to be reliable guides in discerning the places that needed closer examination.