The recital turned out to be one of the most moving I have ever played. From the very first note everyone in the room was rapt. As one listener later put it, she knew every note I played so it was as if she were reliving the experience of playing it.

Many pianists perform for this community but always run-throughs of programs intended for other audiences in other venues. This was a first: A program tailor-made for this audience. They really felt the difference.

It was a clear case of the interpersonal element of music performance that is so often lacking in formal recitals.

I experienced it once in a piano recital by Leon Fleischer back in the 1950's--more correctly, after the recital, when he played Fuer Elise as an encore following a program of some of the most difficult repertoire (Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue and Ravel's Valses Nobles et Sentimentales). After two seconds of tittering the audience in Severance Hall (Cleveland) became totally attentive. I never forgot it.

There may be some irregularity in the next few days as I am off on another coast. (Hmm..off / on)

Among the coming day's activities is a recital I will play of pieces "everyone" played who took piano lessons 50 years ago. Someone remarked to me that they must just roll right off your fingers, as if without thought. Well, no.

To give you a sample of what awaits me: Rediscoveries of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor (the one that causes a piano to self-destruct under the inimitable touch of Chico Marx); The Minute Waltz; the famous Dvorak Humoresque(with popular lyrics about a train...incidentally, my all-time best-selling track on MP3 downloads); and, most astonishing of all, the Mozart Sonata in C, K. 545--you know the one.

It is a most revealing adventure: like getting a whole new life. Which among those is the most frightening? the Mozart, of course.

Since my last post two extraordinary events took place here: on Saturday my young students showed their stuff and yesterday a serious adult just recovering from traumatic hand surgery performed in public for the first time after fearing she might never play again: two totally dissimilar events linked by the power of strong individuality.

The kids all do quite different things with music; for each of them it is a territory more or less sacred within their families. They express this in completely different ways, which they have figured out -- and have made me figure out as well. For the adult pianist, too, playing has involved staking out a territory so powerfully that she has left her family and her country to start a whole new life in New York based on music.

Each of these people commanded attention by sheer inner power, very audible in their music.

Equally extraordinary was the attention paid to their unique offerings by everyone in the room.

There are things that distinguish dance from soccer: Everyone appreciates athleticism--no one more than I. So why go to watch people move around unless they are competing with someone or at least trying to score a goal?

Music is rather like that. I consider it a thought form as well as an art form. Once established as a thought form an individual is free to do with it whatever they desire: incorporate it into a visual or literary imagination, perhaps, or sight-read all of everything. If someone wants to work on technique, whether composition or performance it is a private choice until a public commitment is made--i.e., the decision to do it for money or for a job or for some other contractual arrangement.

Until then, why not treat it as a form of thought like any other? Well, maybe not quite like any other!

How can Boulez be a pre-cursor to Schumann?

It is a question of the bias of listening. If we listened --just listened -- we wouldn't need to care about whether a piece of music is tonal, atonal, post-tonal, or pre-tonal. We would simply respond to what we hear; the sounds would have or not have meaning. The experience might be likened to my reading Finnegan's Wake, an experience I enjoyed thoroughly last year and am currently repeating, in fact; but please don't ask me to explain it.

We shouldn't have to know anything at all in order to listen.

Listening to performances of music by Elliot Carter, Brian Fennelly, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and Robert Dick last night convinced me that a lot of contemporary music seeks to return us to that pre-tonal mode of responding to sound.

Such music is called post-tonal by theorists, but I think they have it backwards. Only people who were devoted to the strictest tonal orthodoxy as setting the standard for what is meaningful would concoct such a notion. In fact, as has been pointed out by psychologists for decades, there are millions of tones; it is entirely arbitrary that seven or nine or twelve have been isolated for us to consider legitimate.

Now here comes a music that can be listened to without a textbook. The Boulez sonatas for piano are like precursors of Schumann's wildest pianistic fantasies. Robert Dick's Heat History is primordial singing and jazz all mixed with the flute's highly recognizable points of tonal reference but skateboarding rings around us all the time.

Such revelations are to be heard at the Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance June 15-23 at Mannes and at Le Poisson Rouge. Check it out.

Some of my greatest joy in teaching comes from the sight-singing groups I lead. All a cappella, we concentrate on tuning, not according to any absolute pitch, but as they did it in the old days--until the late Baroque era, at least--just according to where the voices lie.

Not only do I derive great joy from these groups, but so do the people who sing in them, some of whom have had quite a bit of musical training, others not at all. The point is that the essence of melody lies in the tension of linear motion against harmonics and that anyone can learn to tune the harmonics of tones.

Some of these people report back to me that when they tell musician friends that they are taking a class in sight-singing the musicians groan and commiserate: "Oh, you poor thing!" or "Why on earth would you want to do that!"

I blame over-emphasis on the piano, an entirely unvocal pitch source, for these negative responses.