Today brought one of those moments of deep satisfaction from teaching: My two young adult students (16 and 21) are learning Brahms, not quite their first experience of his music, but close enough. Listening to them respond to the sounds is like being privy to a remarkable natural occurrence, like the beautiful sunsets over the Hudson this past week. They get it in all its intelligent sensuality, not as a result of any analysis but simply from the sounds themselves.

The other day a group of people wanting to learn to sight-sing in tune made their way through a very subtle melody by Thomas Campion (Elizabethan poet/composer). Every "error," every insecurity in their reading revealed a quintessentially poetic moment in the piece.

After going through it just twice it was already a deeply moving experience. Granted it was in the presence of someone who could put their tonal searchings in the context of musical reading. But isn't that the point of reading?

When I was in school we used to make fun of overstuffed-armchair harmony that chewed up everything in sight in an epic tidal wave of sound that I call "Val-Hallywood." The mixed metaphors make the point better than I can in just a few better-chosen words.

It's fascinating that now, in the 21st century, our musical environment seems to be once again enamored of stasis. Over-emphasizing vertical tuning we have lost the edge of a lot of music that was conceived contrapuntally.

I heard a recent recording of a mid-20th-century quintet the contrapuntal power of which still haunts me from a live performance I heard in 1972. In this more recent rendering the counterpoint is nowhere evident; the players have devoted their considerable expertise to blend.

What will it take to put life back into the line--into all five lines?

I know what it feels like to be triaded to death. When one's listening is conceptually reduced to triadic function the subtle shadings of two-voice combinations are lost, as are the subtle shadings of triads with multiple doublings, as in many Schubert Waltzes. This impoverishment leads to boredom, to lack of finesse, to over-simplification in piano-playing. Coming back to real life after years of such malfunction is not easy.

Test yourself: Try writing out by memory Soldier's March from Schumann's Album for the Young, a masterpiece of precision in this regard.

My ten-year-old nephew (who later became a space/time philosopher) had a favorite riddle:

Mrs. Bigger had a baby. Which was bigger?

The baby was a little Bigger.

There is a musical parallel: When is a triad not a triad?

When you take one note away and position it on the piano so that it sounds like "something else."

In the spirit of the Classical sonata as auditory game, this is what happens in piano works by Haydn, Mozart, Clementi. We have grown so accustomed to assuming triads where they actually are not present that we miss a tremendous amount of double entendre.

Most of the past two days were spent reviewing a new CD of works by a dear musical friend. Our friendship came instantly and in depth straight from my ear to hers: I heard a particular cadence she had written in a particular work and remarked publicly on its beauty. She was in the back of the room (it was a symposium so it not rude to speak out), stood up and announced that that was her all-time favorite cadence and that she was told at the time that if she wrote cadences like that she would never have a career as a composer.

She has had an illustrious career. But even more important, she has never lost that spark of personal commitment that shone through that cadence. That moment of musical recognition has become a deep mutual trust.

We understand one another through the medium of sound. It is amazing that it is so deeply personal and that it means so much to each of us.

A much misunderstood feature of every sonata collection is the Table of Contents. Looking at Vol. I of the Mozart Piano Sonatas we see the following order of keys: C F B-flat E-flat G D. Six sonatas, written one after the other. Is it a progression?

Or take the first three sonatas by Beethoven: F minor A major C. Also a progression, but a less obvious one: 1. Four flats; 2. three sharps (its inverse);
3. Look, Ma! no sharps or flats!

If ever there needed to be an argument in favor of the black key / white key fascination of the piano when it was an innovation I propose these as evidence.