Where does the composer get the idea of starting a composition? In the Mamlok concert last week it was pretty clear that she gets a lot of her starting ideas from nature noises, among which bugs and birds are prominent. She signals as much in many of her titles, like Grasshoppers, In My Garden, etc.

It is less clear with composers who do not give a verbal clue, Mozart, for example. I am at the moment completely fascinated with the centrality in his works of the French horn. When one stops to think that the horn in question is not a modern horn, but the very distinctive natural horn on which every single pitch is colored specifically it boggles the mind.

We have become far too inured to neutralized pitch. To paraphrase a song I recently heard: "Just because you can play all the chromatic tones with equal efficiency doesn't mean you should."

First, apologies for missing a day! I cannot imagine how that happened as I have been thinking about music non-stop these days. Most specifically, I am pondering the chicken and egg aspects of composition.

Once one has studied music in a formal way one tends to think of composition coming before the sound. I am not so sure about that. We know that Mozart refers often in his piano writing to the "horn fifths," that classic configuration of tonic and dominant sound associated with the two horns he uses so often in his orchestrations. But is it that he refers to those sounds, or is it rather that those sounds actually are the root of the entire composition, hidden away as a sort of joke, waiting to be discovered and savored?

Having just spent three days at the Chamber Music America conference I was struck by how little cliche thinking was in evidence. It seems more respect is being given to the off-beat, the mixed genre, the inventive and exploratory in music. How refreshing.

This sense of the new is not at all in conflict with the work of a gifted string quartet. Though they are a "standard" combination dealing with "standard" repertoire, their take on it is altogether personal and impersonal all at once. It represents a high standard of refusal to repeat the already known, to rehash the pre-digested.

There was a lot of talk about the sounds in the cracks between the twelve discrete tones we are still, unfortunately, teaching young children to accept as the basic canon. This is the area of my own specialization. This is what Tonal Refraction addresses.

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.