If you have learned to read you may recall that writing was an important affirmation of your skill as a reader. The best affirmation of that in music is probably Bartok's well-documented ongoing attempt to notate the singing of Hungary's mountain dwellers.

It came to mind the other evening hearing a splendidly piercing reading of Schumann's Kreisleriana by Marc Ponthus. Extreme at both ends of the spectrum of impetuous and lyrical, it proclaimed Schumann as the consummate modernist that I have always felt him to be, having written down what in fact cannot be written down. Ponthus played it as I'm sure it was conceived: fearlessly, wildly, intimately, unforgettably.

The real difficulty with that music is that it is presented to us in metered bars. It has to be the sounds themselves that propel the motion inward or outward.

The sounds themselves...