A blog-follower in Sweden asked whether "notch" of yesterday's post had some meaning other than the openings in a belt. I meant a marker, like the notch you might use to mark a child's growth. What is interesting is that the word the conductor heard and the word I actually said were probably different words altogether.

In speech, as in music, we hear what we want or expect to hear, often at the expense of what is actually there to be heard.

Last night in my singing class people took turns leading the group through a song new to all of us. It is a notation of a song from the American southern mountains--the sort of notation that can't actually be read because the music exists within oral tradition.

As the first person lead the singing my first reaction was, "That's not right!" As she continued I began to feel how her reading differed from my own and by the time she finished I realized she had sung a different song from the one I read. Hers was thoughtful, introspective; it conveyed the energy of secret longing. As others lead in turn the song was transformed into something closer to my own version of it. In groups I prefer the rousing, "all together now" singing that goes for the long phrase.

Interestingly, the quieter version brought out subtle elements of the song's structure. Mine favored the consonant, hers the dissonant.

Which is right? We will never know. That they are different is the lesson of the day.

But my intended "notch" was not a "knock."

Yesterday, after a fine performance by a wonderful community orchestra in Brooklyn, I used the word "notch" in congratulating the conductor on the group's steady improvement over the years. Knowing that I am a professional he understood me to have used the word to indicate my awareness of flaws in the performance.

I have noticed that one of the most difficult things for musicians to hear is praise. There is no such thing as a perfect performance: we all know that. Because we are so aware of how short we fall of our ideal we assume that everyone in the audience hears the glitches.

What would happen if music study included a broader exploration of auditory response than simply pin-pointing right and wrong notes?

Listening, whether to conversation or to music, is among life's more difficult skills. "Ear Training," a required course for musicians-in-school, is more about identifying than about listening. Real listening calls for the ability to shed definitions and hear objectively--though I admit the possibility that objective listening may be an oxymoron.

I have always said that if I were to found a music school listening would be the central discipline, not practicing or competing, or analysis based on visual perception of the printed score. Students would develop a vocabulary to express their responses to all kinds of musical sounds and situations. The pursuit of excellence would be defined by the desire to satisfy one's own ear. I have found that difficult in the extreme.

When I hear students play, whether young or advanced, I am listening for the quality of their engagement with the music. If they are responding to the sounds I have no resistance to their playing, even if it is otherwise flawed.

I recently heard a fine student orchestra perform two rarely programmed symphonies, neither of which I had heard before. One was a youthful symphony by a composer writing within traditional idioms but using recognizable American sounds. The playing was convincing as well as technically fine.

Then followed an intricate, unfamiliar large-scale symphony. I couldn't help but notice the detachment of the majority of string players. (I couldn't see the winds and brass from where I was sitting, but as their parts are much more exposed I doubt they would have conveyed similar cool.) The music is profoundly disquieting, which may explain why the work is not more often programmed. The performance was technically excellent but deeply troubling.

What is achieved by giving excellent young players such difficult material without giving them the means to absorb it at a meaningful level?

As I am now reviewing CDs of new music for New Music Connoisseur I have begun listening to all kinds of recordings. For many years I stayed away from recordings, largely out of dismay at the editorial travesties of the recording industry. Both sound and "performance" were so tidied that little life was evident in either. Listening was like swallowing pillows.

Yesterday it was a recorded live performance of a work that has been weighted down by a sanctimonious approach that makes it borderline bearable. I have heard the work several times and always found it deadly. I have read it with colleagues and found little to look forward to as I turned each page.

Is it the composer's reputation? Is it the work's obvious modernism?

I found myself properly insulated and isolated with my headset in the listening room of the library, bursting out laughing more than once.

So I ask myself, what happens to the humor: is it the print, the highfalutin mystique attached to the composer, the difficulty of the piece, or is it my inability to detect satire?

The recording: Contrasts performed by Joseph Szigeti, Benny Goodman, and the composer, Bela Bartok.

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.