As many of you know from seeing my work I am fascinated by the connections between visual and auditory experience, most specifically on the interchange between them, or the lack thereof.

My friend who specializes in Greek culture as perceived in 18th-century England (how's that for specificity!) tells me that the Greek language was at its most highly inflected with specific endings when it was newborn. With usage it eroded, becoming gradually less refined.

Imagine if music notation had had a similar history, moving from visualizations of vibrations to the rather coarse system we use today.

This day is special: My article Experiments of a Chamber Music Coach on the program I inaugurated at Mannes in 1975 and coordinated until 2007 is in the Nov/Dec. issue of Chamber Music, the magazine of Chamber Music America. In it I describe the program's philosophy and structure -- my methods which were kept under-the-radar for more than 30 years.

The germ of it all is hidden away 5 paragraphs from the end: "It became increasingly clear that the students who trusted their own ears played with greater confidence and satisfaction. There was no way any of them (or us coaches) could play like the Amadeus Quartet: not many Americans equate music with survival, though I know that persons with disability or chronic illness often do." The program would never have happened if my own disability and chronic illness had not precluded a professional performing career.

I do equate music with health and joy, both synonyms for survival.

Yesterday I had the rare experience of playing the Mozart Quintet for Four Winds and Piano, K. 452, together with three expert woodwind players--all of us playing the work for the first time with a natural horn. It was astounding to hear everyone respond to the surprising colors of the horn. These are players who know every note of this work, not only their parts but everyone else's as well.

It completely changed the work for them. The drama was inside of the sound, which is where I have always thought it should be.

Today I had an interesting conversation about teaching music. Why would anyone want to do that, I mean really want to really do that, as opposed to having it be a default way to make a living?

Look at it this way: music is a gift. If you are fortunate enough to have that gift you must have observed that people around you -- family, friends, acquaintances -- often envy the gift. The good news is that it is readily shared.

If luck is with you you share it as a performer. If you are not so fortunate you can find other ways to enrich your life by imparting the best aspects of your gift to others, teaching being an obvious option.

The question really is how are you going to teach: Will it be to have as miserable a time as possible, constantly reminding yourself of your failure to "make" it as a performer? Or will you find ways to keep your spark alive and growing by responding to the individuality of your students -- that is, by treating them the way you would like still to be treated, as both unique and privileged?

What do you see when you open your program at the theatre? A cast of characters:

Joseph, an old man
Gilda, his beloved young daughter
General McMuckamuck, commander of His Majesty's Army
A Sanitation Department worker

Already you are involved in the plot and the curtain has not yet gone up.

What does my sixteen-year-old student see when she opens her Beethoven Sonata in E major, Op. 14 No. 1, last movement? Four sharps, lots of A, A-sharp the first accidental followed soon by B-sharp. Aha! that makes six sharps! One is missing! Which one? E-sharp.

She sight reads the movement, not up to tempo, it's true, but not missing a thing. At the appearance of E-sharp she bursts out laughing: There it is!

When Beethoven transmutes the E-sharp to F-natural in order to proceed to the key of B-flat she gets the giggles. Now this is really funny.

All I recall from being that age was bafflement and a short attention span, certainly nothing bordering on an awareness of tones as characters in a drama.

Is there a non-verbal equivalent to the text in instrumental music? I believe there is. Every instrument, except those in the category of electronica, has a distinctive timbre and specific acoustical properties distributed unevenly throughout its range.

No matter how hard the music establishment has tried to brainwash us into thinking the contrary, this is the case also for the piano. The various registers of the instrument are distinct and affect the total sound differently. Then let us not forget the mechanical/acoustical difference between white-key and black-key resonance.

Contemporary commerce-driven culture is eager to sell the public on the notion that it doesn't matter how pitch is produced since all pitches are interchangeable--correction, since musicians are trained to believe that producing interchangeable pitches is a good idea. A gifted young singer recently told me that even singers are being trained to perform to this standard.

All you have to do is go hear some really fine early-music players to be reminded of the extent to which lyricism is inherent in instruments as it is in the human voice. After all, most instruments were modeled after the voice.

Lately I have been making music together with a fine singer of French chansons, one of the things I most enjoy in all of music. Do I practice them? Not actually. But I sing them constantly: every idle moment a phrase of one or the other is wafting through my entire being. This is perhaps why I love songs so much: I am entirely at their mercy. Actually playing them together with the singer is like giving vent to one's deepest subconscious responses to the song. An ideal art form.