The trouble with competition is that it implies leveling. If those who compete are being assigned to levels, some pronounced higher than others, those who do the assigning are also self-assigned to levels, unspecified.

The trouble with artistic gifts is that they are not level in any respect. That is why the highest level of artistry communicates to the general public in a way that is superior in all respects to judgment by adjudicators. Give me the general public any day.

One of the things Glenn Gould did was to blind young players to the power of the general public to get the message. Perfection has its limits. Artistry does not.

We should think about nightmares. I had a recurring nightmare when I was about ten, much too precise for me to have imagined it--so precise, in fact, that it took a long time to figure it out. It was about tuning, actually. In fact, it was about the difference between the tonic pitch in a Bach English Suite and the solidity of the tonic in a Chopin piece I was playing at the time. The Bach was, of course, not written for the piano. I didn't know that. I knew, however, that I could not "find" its pitch. The Chopin "Raindrop" Prelude, written with the piano in mind, was security itself.

What is more important: to be occupied with the surface of music--the tune that goes round and round in your head and you can't stop it from repeating--or to be so fascinated with tone that you can't get enough of it so you dream about it? For me, it's clearly the latter.

The "tune" is the easy part. The essence is the lasting part. I notice with children who are not attracted to (distracted by?) the mechanical aspects of music that they mature into a consciousness that is extremely refined by the time they are in late adolescence.

There are, of course, the children for whom the separation is impossible: children who live and breathe music, who play constantly, whether fooling around or preparing a lesson. The challenge with these children is to make sure that their music dreams are not nightmares.

I heard a performance last night of a violinist who plays in a string quartet performing a Beethoven Sonata for Piano and Violin together with a talented undergraduate as part of a project to teach students the repertoire by playing together with them.

When the priority of these works is reversed so that they become Sonatas for Violin and Piano the role of the pianist is reduced to that of wallpaper or floor covering. It should rather be that the sound of the piano pulls into itself the sound of the obbligato instrument. This is what a well-managed damper pedal accomplishes if both players know how to listen.

Without listening and without proper use of the pedal the piano timbre drives the pitch of the violin higher and higher. Is this what Beethoven had in mind?

"You can't teach sound." Wise words from a fifteen-year-old. How can anyone convince an intelligent child that a piece of music is the same on one piano as on another? It isn't. Nothing about it is "the same" except perhaps a theoretical scheme that abstracts from the sound a kind of logical procedure with identifiable elements.

But that isn't the music.

No instrument begs the question as much as the piano, for there is no such thing as "the" piano. Maybe that's why piano instruction is so regimented as to deny the very nature of each instrument we play and why musicians who play sonatas "For Piano and ..." fail to listen to the particular piano with which they play.

Ever since there has been a musical culture in Europe composers have incorporated sounds of everyday life into their works. I was fortunate to have lived in Europe before the postwar change of life-style to include automobiles and superhighways. I heard lots of things that are no longer part of the daily street scene, like bells--many, many bells. Also heavy hammering, a couple of drunks harmonizing maudlin melodies in the middle of the night, workmen singing as they made a wall--things that are pretty much gone. It is fun to imagine what kind of persistent, repetitive noise Mozart might have been recalling when he wrote those repeated, rather puzzling chords.

Yesterday a young student was sight-reading Mozart's Sonata in G, K. 283, the last movement. In it Mozart repeats a chord four times--an unusual chord, not particularly pleasant, but definitely conspicuous. Laughing, the student said it sounded like a car horn.

That could not have been the sound Mozart had in mind; but surely he had something just as specific in mind--most likely a noise from everyday 18th-century life.

It is hard to imagine what it might have been, but one thing is clear: we live in an extremely noisy environment. In the few moments between the end of the preceding paragraph and the beginning of this one I was aware of many pitched sounds: the beeping of a bus backing up, a humming motor under my desk, a droning airplane flying past, plus two noisy thumpings: the heat in the pipes and my building's elevator.

Is it far-fetched to imagine that composers sometimes write so as to make us more aware of listening?