The piano is not one but a thousand instruments. Its sound lives on many levels and is responsive to such a myriad to touches and balances. Last night the master of them all played at Zankel Hall: Piotr Anderszewski in a program of Szymanowski and Janacek--not the usual fare. His playing is kaleidoscopic. When have I heard a pianist better match a violin's harmonics?

To hear such a virtuoso play pianissimo, barely breathing on the piano, is rare, very rare.

Last night's listening was of a totally different kind: the sizable audience seemed to be in on the code--a modernist code exemplified in three pieces written during the past year by serious composers. It is a tuneless and mostly toneless kind of modernism related only in one work to a process that I recognize, in that case, dance.

Oddly, I thought, the concert ended with Stravinsky's Les Noces, written in the 1920's, programmed I suppose as the prototype for modernism. But there we had decidedly human interactions in the voices, in the solo roles, in the percussion accompaniment. That made it sound and feel very traditional, indeed.

The other day I stood among some people listening intently as a young woman pronounced her name on the piano in what I can only describe as an awesome display of precise listening on everyone's part.

Maybe what gets in the way when we hear interpretations of written works is our need to pass judgment rather than to trust our own responses. Passing judgment involves imposing a measure of conformity to the experience, if you think about it.

I have been told by musicians in the jazz world that New York audiences are less spontaneous than audiences elsewhere in this country. The worry about not being "in" seems to keep us New Yorkers from having a good time.

According to a friend Wagner thought that Beethoven's improvisation was even more interesting than the pieces he wrote down. Was that really true or was it simply that Wagner paid better attention to things he had never heard before and knew he was never going to hear again?

What crops up over and over again is that music is an integral part of life, not an add-on.

Yesterday I received, as if from heaven, a recorded collection of informal chats featuring my childhood piano and organ teacher, Chauncey L. Griffith--a hugely influential populist-musician whose wonderful work inspired much of my professional life, especially my work with adult amateurs at Mannes College. (Chauncey died 30 years ago, so it really was from heaven.)

It brought home to me just how powerful the influences are when a drive as central as music is involved. How powerful the outcome, whether positive or negative, is a measure of the power of the drive.

A beautiful message from one of you prompts today's post.

We listen better to others if we feel free to express ourselves. In other words, if we expect to be listened to we listen better.

This is why it is central to music reading to invent music on one's own terms. Over-emphasis on notation keeps many people from experimentation with sound. This in turn makes it hard to read music with imagination.

Why not invent new ways to write down what one invents? Several of my students compose music. I never look at their notation; I "only" listen. As a result their music reading is superior to mine in that they go directly from notation to sound without the distraction of concepts or "time-saving" formulas. Their reading superior because I learn from it.

Learning to listen without the distraction of my own learned concepts and formulas was a major accomplishment. It improved my listening to everything, including the farthest out new music.

It is like watching magic unfold to be among people who are rapt in listening for meaning. It happened yesterday at the Kaleidoscope. I was among the listeners as a young woman pronounced her name on the piano -- not an easy thing to do. As she became more and more intent on its exact articulation and inflection it turned into music with such clear affect that others in the room could name it.

The tone of detailed listening being set, we all listened together as Haydn pronounced his myriad names in a Sonata in D.