People often ask me if I am a composer. After that wonderful Shapey concert I realized that instrumentalists are not encouraged to think beyond the technical difficulties of their instruments or, if they are, it is in terms of theoretical analyses that cannot possibly "grab" an audience's attention.

Effective performers are those who inhabit the sensibility of the composer by musically living through all the references they can find in the composition to the experience of the living, breathing creative intelligence who wrote the piece. Snatches of popular music, of technical studies, of standard repertoire; references to other genres, even the use of single pitches in splendidly inventive ways (like Ursula Mamlok using the orchestra's tuning A as a joke in her oboe concerto, recently recorded by Heinz Holliger on Bridge)--all such devices grab our attention, catch us unawares, awaken us to new experience even of familiar music.

Such moments exist in all Western music; the performers job is to seek them out.

Last night I attended an entire concert of works by a contemporary composer whose work I usually find most uninviting. It is against my principles to attend concerts devoted exclusively to the work of a single composer, even if Bach, Chopin, or Mozart. I do make exceptions: Helmut Walcha playing all-Bach, Rubinstein all-Chopin--wouldn't miss it. For all-Mozart I recall Horszowski recitals with great pleasure.

Last night was Ralph Shapey. I went because the event was conceived, planned, and in part performed by someone who loves his work. The extraordinary violinist Miranda Cuckson plays this music as if she wrote it herself. The players she recruited to join in the evening were clearly as devoted to the project as she is.

The result was that the audience seemed to agree (based on after-concert chat) that this composer had not over-stayed his welcome. It was, by the way, an audience that included professionals as well as non-musicians who came out of curiosity.

Here was a good example of a performer living up to the tremendous responsibility of making the music come alive.

I did not expect to like it. I had a great time.

Using the lesson I learned from that Mozart performance I prepared to perform a Haydn sonata yesterday by not practicing it at all. I practiced around it, so to speak--a trick I learned many years ago while preparing to perform Schubert's Lovely Milleress song cycle.

I realized that practicing the actual accompaniments would guarantee their lifeless performance. (This is a form of ritual murder to which we become inured when hanging out with the wrong crowd.) Thus, with an open ear and attitude of curiosity I discovered yesterday a fascinating tonal relationship in the sonata which had never previously been apparent to me. I had so much fun tracking this new found delight that it was like playing the piece for the first time.

One of the audience members commented that it was not like the usual Haydn. I think the "usual" Haydn is a creation of teachers who have tried for years to make a Classical composer out of this most inventive man whose insights bridged two distinct eras. His piano sonatas evoke Baroque vocal sensibilities from the newfangled piano. Whenever I play these astonishing pieces I can feel Haydn's socks being knocked off by this amazing instrument.

A recent performance of a familiar Mozart Piano Sonata proved [insofar as an ephemeral moment in a one-time occurrence can "prove" anything] central to my observations about the effect on players of the music we play.

The performer was doing splendidly in terms of technique and memorization. As I listened I was increasingly aware of the bizarre twists that comprise the sonata's theme. The pianist must have noted these twists as I did because at the next repetition of the material he got stuck. I would bet that the performance was prepared by stressing repetition as a reliable source of structural orientation, while more emphasis on the variability of the material -- the several ways it could be heard -- might have engaged the mind in a different enterprise which would have made getting stuck less likely.

Nothing serious. Just something to think about.

Imagine you are nine and the Clementi Sonatina in C is the 18th century equivalent of a computer game, filled with booby traps and assorted threats in the form of menacing black keys, terrifying dissonances--all kinds of unprepared disturbances.

Or have you grown so accustomed to hearing the piece in its mangle-ironed state that there is no room in it for fantasy play?

Today's nine-year-old thought it was a riot to approach it this way. We both decided that even though one risked making mistakes (which you do anyway) it was a whole lot more fun.

Those of us who have lived with the piano all our lives are more than a bit spoiled by it. Just as anyone under 20 has a hard time imagining life without computers anyone born after, say, 1800, would find it difficult to imagine life without pianos.

It is perhaps impossible to imagine just what the impact must have been of all that resonance all of a sudden emanating from a keyboard instrument. People who describe the sound of the forte piano as thin are comparing it with the modern piano. The closest anyone might have come who was alive in 1727 would have been the sound of the baryton or of the viola d'amore--stringed instruments with unfingered strings in constant sympathetic vibration.

Haydn was certainly writing for an instrument he heard as fully fleshed out because, to the ear of the 18th century, the forte piano was richly resonant.

Yesterday one of my teenage students wanted to work on a piece on which she was "stuck." (I wondered whether at her age I would have volunteered an admission that I needed help in quite that way.)

Since she has worked on balancing the cantabile melody with the repeated chordal accompaniment, thinking about the technique is no longer necessary or interesting. I suggested she imagine words to go with each phrase and play so that I could hear her inflections. To our mutual enjoyment, she did so right off.

That her result did not match anything I might have imagined did not matter. Most likely she will change her mind about it over and over again. Whatever happens, the music is now where she wants it to be, in motion.