Listening fascinates me. Hoping to glean insight into it from another point of view I began reading The Listener's Art. I find it has very little to do with what I call listening and a lot to do with the kind of literalized response to music which assumes that awareness of structure is a good thing.

It seems to me that structure contains its own message which you get the instant you recognize a phrase that you heard previously in the piece or that is quoted from another source. Structure is as structure does, one might say.

Next week I am going to hear a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major by Piotr Anderszewski, whose work I find, with few exceptions, instructive. I am preparing as I might prepare to meet W.H.Auden for tea. A few things you need to know:

- I do not go chasing Mozart concerto's. I find them, for the most part, troubling, not just to play (they are not simple) but also to listen to. Despite their popularity and the fact that "everyone" plays them they often leave me puzzled.

- I recently bought the full scores of all the concerto's, determined to figure out why I am so puzzled by them.

- You cannot believe my disappointment that he is to play in G major.

That's where the story starts.

Why am I disappointed?

After finally purchasing a ticket -- I had been delaying making the commitment - I began playing from the score. A flood of memories came over me.

G major is an easy key, isn't it? Perhaps to play; not to hear. It is one of the tonalities that is skewed on the piano because of the relative strength of black key pitch compared to white keys. That pesky F# makes the third note of the scale a highly sensitive tone, thus skewing all the relationships using B.

As a child I was troubled to an unbelievable extent by the sound of Mozart's only piano sonata in G major. As a tonality it fares much better - and completely differently - when accompanied by strings. Interesting that the early piano / violin sonatas are designated as being for the piano accompanied by a violin. The strings temper the resonances within the key because they do not have the same mechanical / acoustical values so specific to the piano alone.

I was reluctant to encounter, again, my feeling of complete ignorance in the face of such powerful impressions as those in this most exposed key.

It turns out to be filled with references to that early G major sonata, as well as to other great works in G major and minor.

Here is another instance in the long list of pieces that require affirmation of their actual sound. In the case of Mozart's oeuvre, most of them are among the "easy" pieces.

In one of my small a cappella singing groups we have passed a real milestone: the singers themselves recognize the beauty of their sound very specifically in how focused it is and how good it feels. It is a matter of shared attentiveness that produces the desired result and that observes so keenly both the inner and outer success of their efforts.

This aspect of self-evaluation is missing in so much music training in which the teacher is usually the one who decides whether or not the performance is good. But the student is the one who has to know on his or her own terms.

It very often happens in a piano lesson that I will accept a student's playing as good enough but the student, noting spots that need fixing, will promptly fix them. I find this spectacular when the student is ten years old.

I have been trying to understand the writings of a prominent nineteenth-century music critic, Eduard Hanslick. As far as I can figure out, he is arguing against the emotional content of music, claiming for it instead something called beauty. Perhaps he was reacting against the overblown, emotionally charged hyperbole of much of the writing of his time, in which the words heroic and tragic were the most frequently used.

But there is the bath water and then there is the baby. Is color emotional? How can it not be? Doesn't everyone with a voice have a feeling associated with its intonation when singing, or speaking for that matter?

A music theory teacher in college maintained that music is, above all, a social art. This seems obvious at first glance, but I wonder if it social in the way that we usually intend the word?

I am a performer in part because I need music to be social, not in the sense that I need a room full of people in order to perform. There is more to it.

My ear works idiosyncratically, it always has. I could never explain how it works; I didn't need to because I knew that the audience followed it the way they would follow a story read aloud to them. They didn't need to agree or disagree; simply by listening (as opposed to walking out) they affirmed that the way I hear is interesting. That affirmation has been important to me since I was very young.

Being listened to is vital to a performing musician or composer. That's the social part.

Today a student rewarded me with a beautifully fluid reading of the Chopin G major Prelude, under tempo, of course, because she doesn't practice, but full of entirely pianistic nuance. In such hands, it is a study not in mechanical regularity but in the infinite color potential built into an instrument on which the smallest variants in finger position express nuances in the line.

I was not aware of the expressive power of the differently shaped and sized fingers of the two hands until after much damage had been done; I had believed that what looked regular on a piece of paper was supposed to sound that way.

A paper I recently read brought up the notion that not everyone hears the same way and that it is not necessarily a good idea to assume that everyone should, though music pedagogy goes to a lot of trouble to try to get that to happen.

I find it counterproductive to work toward that goal. The way I hear defines my musical self and that is who I am--it is my identity. It binds me to others who hear the way I hear. How do I know who they are? By listening to their music, whether they are living performers or composers no longer with us. The thought of losing that is intolerable.

The belief that we hear as individuals and are bound to others by the sheer power of that individuality is the basis of my teaching. The children I teach do not organize themselves in any systematic way around what they hear. Each hears as he or she hears and respects the auditory organization of the others. If there is a stronger basis for mindful music learning I cannot imagine it.