Rhythm and tone are two completely separate dimensions of music and represent two entirely different areas of physical and mental activity. Many people have trouble reconciling them, as I did for many years. Rhythm is usually the first one to be emphasized in pedagogy and it quickly becomes tyrannical, blocking out whatever chance tone might have had to exercise equivalent power.

I learn about this mostly from the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.

In a couple of days I will be leaving to attend a conference of Music Theorists. I was puzzled by Music Theory when I was young and still am. It seemed to me that theorists were telling us how we should hear music but that seemed the wrong way around. We hear music the way we hear it: it is composers who instruct us about our potential to hear more and more and more.

It would be fair to say that all of my teaching is based on this premise.

Last night my singing group, once again, affirmed the validity of this premise. The group included two people who had never been in such a group before and who have zero confidence as readers. The song was a spiritual, Now Let Me Fly. Without coaching, without input of any kind, they found, just by using their ears, the most meaningful part of the song and expressed it so beautifully that I almost cried.

They taught me the song. That's why I have always enjoyed working with the unschooled, the unspoiled: children and amateurs.

Today brought one of those moments of deep satisfaction from teaching: My two young adult students (16 and 21) are learning Brahms, not quite their first experience of his music, but close enough. Listening to them respond to the sounds is like being privy to a remarkable natural occurrence, like the beautiful sunsets over the Hudson this past week. They get it in all its intelligent sensuality, not as a result of any analysis but simply from the sounds themselves.

The other day a group of people wanting to learn to sight-sing in tune made their way through a very subtle melody by Thomas Campion (Elizabethan poet/composer). Every "error," every insecurity in their reading revealed a quintessentially poetic moment in the piece.

After going through it just twice it was already a deeply moving experience. Granted it was in the presence of someone who could put their tonal searchings in the context of musical reading. But isn't that the point of reading?

When I was in school we used to make fun of overstuffed-armchair harmony that chewed up everything in sight in an epic tidal wave of sound that I call "Val-Hallywood." The mixed metaphors make the point better than I can in just a few better-chosen words.

It's fascinating that now, in the 21st century, our musical environment seems to be once again enamored of stasis. Over-emphasizing vertical tuning we have lost the edge of a lot of music that was conceived contrapuntally.

I heard a recent recording of a mid-20th-century quintet the contrapuntal power of which still haunts me from a live performance I heard in 1972. In this more recent rendering the counterpoint is nowhere evident; the players have devoted their considerable expertise to blend.

What will it take to put life back into the line--into all five lines?

I know what it feels like to be triaded to death. When one's listening is conceptually reduced to triadic function the subtle shadings of two-voice combinations are lost, as are the subtle shadings of triads with multiple doublings, as in many Schubert Waltzes. This impoverishment leads to boredom, to lack of finesse, to over-simplification in piano-playing. Coming back to real life after years of such malfunction is not easy.

Test yourself: Try writing out by memory Soldier's March from Schumann's Album for the Young, a masterpiece of precision in this regard.

My ten-year-old nephew (who later became a space/time philosopher) had a favorite riddle:

Mrs. Bigger had a baby. Which was bigger?

The baby was a little Bigger.

There is a musical parallel: When is a triad not a triad?

When you take one note away and position it on the piano so that it sounds like "something else."

In the spirit of the Classical sonata as auditory game, this is what happens in piano works by Haydn, Mozart, Clementi. We have grown so accustomed to assuming triads where they actually are not present that we miss a tremendous amount of double entendre.