About fine quartet playing: Still in 2010 we are recovering from 100+ years of melody separated from harmony. Music sometimes works like that, but not always. It was interesting to hear Friday in the morning Steve Reich discussing resultant tones--i.e., the lines that result when lines are being played or sung in imitation, which has been happening since people started playing that particular game--and then in the afternoon to hear the Carducci Quartet play Beethoven so that the ear was drawn into the total sound event, not distracted by the surface sound.

This is the real reason why it takes four people to play a quartet: all contribute to a mysterious outcome that defies notation. The melody plus harmony solution is an over-simplification stemming ultimately from an understandable need to have the printed score make sense. There is more to it than that. There has to be, or it wouldn't take four people to make it come to life; it would require only one leader and three followers, which is what quartet playing--in fact, a lot of chamber music--has become.

Yesterday I heard for the first time a young string quartet whose work was entirely satisfying. Their sound glowed as if from inside the music, not dominated by any single player. Considering that they began their offering with Beethoven Op. 59 No. 2 it was all the more impressive.

I was especially interested that they had won the Concert Artists' Guild competition in 2007--not an expected pick for winners of an American competition, which speaks to the taste of those judges. Don't be mislead by their Italian name: they are 1/2 British, 1/2 Irish (two young couples).

Watch for them: The Carducci Quartet.

In the afterglow of an evening celebrating the music of Ursula Mamlok I walked around all day yesterday with rich thoughts and feelings about this extraordinary woman and her magnificent music -- too much, apparently, to permit a brief blog post.

An appreciation of what she has accomplished entails an overview of 20th-century composition. It always felt to me as if a conspiracy was threatening to take over the musical imagination of a couple of generations paralyzed by war and displacement. It sounds simplistic to say it was serialism, and I don't mean to condemn serialism as a technique, it was rather a kind of atonality applied to hearing. It is as if music, according to this movement, was to be written so as not to be heard.

Ursula was one of the few who could not go there. Her love of sound, of the classics, of the feel of tone, comes through beginning already in the 60's, when she was told that if she wrote "like that" she would never have a career. Well, she has had a career and, at 87, continues to enjoy excellent performances by a whole new generation of players who love her music.

If you don't know her music I encourage you to go in pursuit. A new CD, Volume I of her works, has just been released on Bridge Records. It includes a knockout performance by Heinz Holliger of her oboe concerto: moving and hilarious in the great tradition. Bravo, Ursula!

The trouble with writing music down is that it can't be written down. There are so many elements that cause a composition to arise, it would be impossible to track them all or even to imagine how diverse they might be -- as large as life would not be an exaggeration. Awareness of this level of creative reference should not be reserved for scholars.

Children can be made aware of specificity in sound; they can be made aware that one piano sounds different from another. This simple observation promotes curiosity. That's enough to last a lifetime: not answers, questions.

What makes a tone come alive is not all that different from what makes a word come alive. There are in music hidden clues that indicate the reference of tones to life sounds.

Sometimes we need these references to be pointed out to us as the sound referred to is not part of our culture. For example, the piano has a repeated F# in the Dvorak Dumky Trio. None of the other instruments is involved with that pitch at the time. I was told by my teacher, who was from Prague, that it was a tolling bell. Even contemporary Czechs do not recognize it.

For me this examples affirms the specificity of tones and tone references. It is not a foolish question to wonder where a composition originates -- why it is in such a key, centered on such a tone, why it drifts into this unlikely realm.

Yesterday I experienced a kind of Proustian moment in relation to specific sounds in Mozart piano sonatas. I recall as a child having pronounced reactions to specific sounds in those sonatas. The sounds I liked were mostly cadences in C Major, though in general I found that to be a "boring" key. There were some others, but not as consistently identifiable.

The agreeable sounds were surrounded by sounds I most particularly did not like. When they occurred I would turn the page. I played a sonata from beginning to end only on assignment, in which case I spent a lot of time holding my auditory nose.

Now, fascinated by the implications of these contrasting feelings, I am going back over the material, this time with an informed ear. I am astounded to learn the legitimacy of my child reactions.

The point I am making is that primary impressions are key to engaging the imaginative intelligence of a musical child. All the schooling in the world should reinforce, not diminish their integrity. Would that it were so.

Today I listened as my two teenage students made a Stravinsky duo come to life, literally, in their ears and in their fingers. It took some self-discipline on my part but I did not want to interfere by checking whether they were playing all the right notes. Working on their own, they self-corrected with each repetition while developing a clear image of how the music wanted to sound.

For me it was like giving them a promotion and a raise in pay to trust them to work through this difficult music with minimal interference on my part.