The purpose of teaching a child to read music is not that they can sit down and rattle off notes but that they understand what they are hearing. My ten-year-old student knows when Haydn is teasing. She doesn't need to be told what to do about it. She can play so that you know where the joke lies, and she does it tastefully without any coaching.

How old were you before you realized that Haydn had a sense of audible humor?

It was as I suspected it would be: whereas the tones themselves convey all there needs to be of spirituality the performer, apparently unaware of that, had to pour it on.

It would be like looking at a Cezanne still life and outlining the apples as if that is all there was to it. To make the apple more beautiful you might use a red marker instead of a pencil.

It is common knowledge that music and the spiritual are closely bound. I observe the connection to be inherent in the act of perceiving tone, apart from and not in reference to any literal or specifically contextual sense. That is why a non-religious composer can compose incredibly convincing religious music. What comes to mind is Shostakovich's E minor Piano Trio.

Getting too literal about the quality of sacredness is like getting too sentimental. Sentiment has nothing to do with it.

Tonight I am going to hear the performance of the last work by another non-religious composer, Bartok. Written when he knew he was dying the second movement's tempo marking includes the word "religioso," a word he had never previously used. I have already begun thinking about it.

The weekend was spent celebrating Easter. It was an occasion to demonstrate once again that pitch is specific and that we humans respond accordingly.

Every American dislikes singing the national anthem because it has a high F, usually perceived to be much too high for comfort. But on Easter--on two occasions in the course of the two-day celebration, in fact--high church Episcopalians sing a response that has three high G's. The sound is unbelievable.

Today I sing the praises of Muzio Clementi! Remember him? He presents a good example of a casualty of standard music notation. I am talking about his brilliant collection of Preludes and Exercises for piano in all the major and minor keys.

What is a prelude? In his day they were improvisatory introductions to more formal works, usually fugues--as in Preludes and Fugues. The key word is improvisatory, a quality which is hard to notate and even harder to read. Every measure has the right number of notes and the correct disposition of note values. What makes it improvisatory is that it takes its timing, not from standard metric considerations but from the sound itself.

Yesterday working on the E minor Prelude a teenage student unearthed the brilliance of these insightful piano sound studies. The right hand seems to be playing normal E minor scales. The left hand elegantly enhances the lyrical disposition of each scale so that metric timing is outweighed by sensitive voicing.

Of course, the prelude can be played with the metric consideration foremost in one's mind. But that will only evoke memories of what you probably disliked about Clementi when you were a young piano student. The other way will evoke awareness of how sensitive the interaction can be between your ear and the piano.

Another great pianist to pay attention to: Julius Drake. A satisfying evening of Brahms songs sung by Ian Bostridge would not have been possible without this brilliant piano playing.

Brilliant is an interesting word to have used because I do not mean it the way it is usually applied to piano playing. This playing was sensitive to every minuscule vibration, every transition between songs, every tiny nuance of timing. Brilliant in that it illuminated the invisible.

Listening has two aspects: Paying attention is the most obvious one. But the other is equally important: expressing yourself with trust that you will be listened to.

Perhaps this best expresses why I became a musician--why it matters so much to me to pursue this way of life.

What I find truly magical is that every once in a while I feel as if I am hearing sounds that are still alive after hundreds of years. These are like memories that transcend the time frame of ordinary existence.