Familiarity with a tune often breeds the inability to hear it anymore. Everyone knows the sensation of a melody that just keep going round and round in the brain, forever looping, driving us mad.

Next time that happens take charge: Linger over each tone in turn, only moving on when holding it becomes virtually impossible.

The sensation is rather like filling a water glass drop by drop until the surface tension actually raises the water level above the rim of the glass before it overflows.

Listening is as alive and changing as we are. Ideally we keep an open ear--open to different styles, interpretations, levels, and so on. The alternative is being narrow minded in a way we would hardly tolerate in relation to any other aspect of life.

I just had an experience of my own musical prejudice at work. Needing to check on a specific detail in Beethoven's Sonata Op. 31, No. 1, I realized that the only recording I had at hand was by Wilhelm Kempf, a pianist whose work I did not admire. Oh well! To my surprise the recording was excellent in every way -- okay, I might quibble about this and that, but the details of articulation, the source of my curiosity, were exquisite.

I must have changed.

Or perhaps the artist had changed. Perhaps this was recorded at a different time in his life than when I heard him live, also playing Beethoven--a performance I disliked intensely. If he were still alive I would definitely go hear him with an open ear.

It is time to update the definition of amateur. It used to mean someone who played music for the love of playing. I think it has come to mean someone who imitates recorded music so proficiently that they can pretend to be professional. With that standard surely no one will notice the difference.

Recently I attended a round table on Deep Listening - you can hear it for yourself on the website of the Philoctetes Center. The process of recording a few prominent rock and jazz musicians was described in detail. One could argue with some of the decisions regarding overdubbing, but the goal was to capture the unique artistry of each featured artist.

At the end of the session a stereophile on the panel played his all-time favorite LP: Dame Janet Baker singing Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. By contrast to the other recordings, this was unrelentingly sterile. The supposedly high class artist had been accorded less sympathetic attention than the pop singers.

The vulnerability that makes all music meaningful is endangered by the technological cool of misguided recording engineers. This cool has become the standard by which many people who really do love music judge their own playing and singing. Alas.

People have ongoing arguments about what it means to play or sing in tune. While I cannot pretend to have anything definitive to say on the subject, I do have some practiced insights that might be helpful in case you find yourself wondering whether someone or something is in tune.

Yesterday I heard a chorus of well-intentioned, earnest amateurs sing all the right notes in a lovely program mixing old and new music--just the kind of program I most enjoy. They were in tune with some rehearsal piano that, though not present in the room, nonetheless was keeping them from tuning to one another. In other words, they were not actively responding to the sounds of their fellow singers.

Just now I heard a clip on MySpace of a new jazz group, The Spokes, comprised of three composers playing clarinet, soprano sax and trombone. This remarkable combo, clearly aware of what they are doing, attempts the impossible: The two high instruments flit around in dizzying chromatic runs, sometimes perfectly in tune, sometimes ever-so-slightly not, but always in relation to one another. It is like an image that is deliberately both in and out of focus. It is a beautiful example of music-making that keeps the definition of in-tune a participation between composer, player and listener.

Last night a friendly group of amateur players and singers joined me for an informal reading of two Bach cantatas. We had a splendid time, largely because of the complete absence of pretension in the room. Everyone knew it was impossible, under the circumstances, to do a "perfect" job of this demanding music, yet we all participated wholeheartedly.

The absence of rigidity brought out some of the essence of the two masterworks. Both are about time as embodied in the liturgical season of Advent. It is a time within time, a time of waiting. Waiting for what, exactly? And how will we know when it is here? These mysteries are present in the odd metrics of the two cantatas (Nos. 1 and 140). Strange entrances, rests in odd places, phrases in augmentation and diminution--devices questioning the nature of musical time, another kind of time within time.

How frequently one hears this music reduced to a routinized meter in which predictability is the standard and the message--the very opposite of the music.

One last post about teaching/learning:

Today one of the youthful four-hand pair volunteered that the Stravinsky piece they were playing was like a pelican.

I expect I will be smiling at this for quite a while. I suspect that both she and her partner will develop a special feel for this piece and probably for whatever music of Stravinsky they will hear in the future.

From now on I will shift the focus of this blog to performance, mostly of contemporary music.

These days I am enjoying attending many contemporary music performances. It saddens me that the music world is so divided into what feel like enemy camps--the traditionalists, who have their own sectarian subsections, vs. the moderns. Within just one week I have heard performances dedicated entirely to the work of a single composer: Ralph Shapey and Davidowsky. In each concert I was struck by the powerful musical means with which the composer treated the conflict within their own development. It is a problem on a massive scale involving far more than compositional technique. Each composer has clearly struggled to find and express an individual voice in the face of cultural forces that feel inimical.

Analysis of those cultural forces would be the subject of a major study, which has been undertaken by thinkers about music in the name of philosophy, music criticism, cultural history and so on.

My concern is with the history of each individual musician and music student confronting or condoning these forces in the process of making a life.