It was really surprising the other day to hear an excellent student orchestra playing well, every note in place, every entrance neat and tidy, everything as much in order as could be imagined in a very ambitious work -- except that the colossal humor of the piece was nowhere to be found.

I was reminded of a recent master class of Robert Levin which he concluded by glaring at the audience and growling: "Do you know what is missing in Classical music?"

"HUMOR!!!"

It may seem odd that a post about a painter appeared on this blog about listening. The connection is that it takes openness to see and also to listen. An image may continue to delight and instruct us years after we first saw it though at the time we didn't realize its potential impact. The same is true of sound.

People sometimes come up to me and recall a concert I played thirty years ago. I consider it an affirmation of our mutual capacity to open ourselves to sound--me as performer, the other as listener.

How nice that people can react even without the imprimatur of media fame.

Yesterday I attended the opening of a retrospective exhibition of paintings done by a woman who began painting in her 80's and continued until she died at 101. The paintings include some astonishing landscapes displaying an extraordinary sense of structure and color.

One of the most outstanding aspects of the show is that someone believed in her genius--actually two people, but one in a position to further her career as an artist. That one, Otto Kallir, was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known. As a young student, new to New York City, I needed a job. With a fresh B.A. that qualified me for not very much, I consulted the Times Help Wanteds, starting with A for Art Gallery. That part-time job was one of the most fortuitous things that ever happened to me.

Kallir responded to the directly unique aspect of people. He supported people whose spark was vivid to him, whether a woman in her 80's -- most of the people around him thought he was mad to do that -- or a youngster still searching for the right road.

The painter was Anna Mary Robertson Moses. I recommend the show, running through March at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York.

The trouble with competition is that it implies leveling. If those who compete are being assigned to levels, some pronounced higher than others, those who do the assigning are also self-assigned to levels, unspecified.

The trouble with artistic gifts is that they are not level in any respect. That is why the highest level of artistry communicates to the general public in a way that is superior in all respects to judgment by adjudicators. Give me the general public any day.

One of the things Glenn Gould did was to blind young players to the power of the general public to get the message. Perfection has its limits. Artistry does not.

We should think about nightmares. I had a recurring nightmare when I was about ten, much too precise for me to have imagined it--so precise, in fact, that it took a long time to figure it out. It was about tuning, actually. In fact, it was about the difference between the tonic pitch in a Bach English Suite and the solidity of the tonic in a Chopin piece I was playing at the time. The Bach was, of course, not written for the piano. I didn't know that. I knew, however, that I could not "find" its pitch. The Chopin "Raindrop" Prelude, written with the piano in mind, was security itself.

What is more important: to be occupied with the surface of music--the tune that goes round and round in your head and you can't stop it from repeating--or to be so fascinated with tone that you can't get enough of it so you dream about it? For me, it's clearly the latter.

The "tune" is the easy part. The essence is the lasting part. I notice with children who are not attracted to (distracted by?) the mechanical aspects of music that they mature into a consciousness that is extremely refined by the time they are in late adolescence.

There are, of course, the children for whom the separation is impossible: children who live and breathe music, who play constantly, whether fooling around or preparing a lesson. The challenge with these children is to make sure that their music dreams are not nightmares.

I heard a performance last night of a violinist who plays in a string quartet performing a Beethoven Sonata for Piano and Violin together with a talented undergraduate as part of a project to teach students the repertoire by playing together with them.

When the priority of these works is reversed so that they become Sonatas for Violin and Piano the role of the pianist is reduced to that of wallpaper or floor covering. It should rather be that the sound of the piano pulls into itself the sound of the obbligato instrument. This is what a well-managed damper pedal accomplishes if both players know how to listen.

Without listening and without proper use of the pedal the piano timbre drives the pitch of the violin higher and higher. Is this what Beethoven had in mind?