Just within the past two days I have had conversations with several people from various sectors of the musical world on the subject of generic music composition and performance. Then last night I heard an informal performance by an accomplished musician; during a 45 minute set there was one song that conveyed convincing personal involvement. While grateful for that song I wonder what happens to that singer the rest of the time?

I am fascinated by vulnerability in the voice and in instrumental playing convinced that it is what makes some music truly great as opposed to routine.

The deeply personal connection I feel to the music of Ursula Mamlok is rooted in my reaction to a splendid bit of counterpoint approaching a cadence in the slow movement of her Woodwind Quintet. The performance by The Quintet of the Americas took place about 40 years ago in a public symposium, an event which permitted me to stand up and express my awe at its beauty. As it happened Ursula was in the back of the room. She stood up, declared that to be her "favorite cadence" though colleagues told her that is she wrote like that she "would never have a career." We have been friends ever since.

I was disappointed by a recent performance of the work by a different quintet who verticalized the composition, treating the approach harmonically rather than contrapuntally. The effect was totally lost.

With the visit to New York of Ursula Mamlok, still going strong at 87, I am reminded once more of how deeply personal the gift of music is. I am so moved that she found a way to give voice to her strong personality. The musicians who respond to that voice have been unafraid to recognize its power, some of them long before she has achieved the recognition she now enjoys and so richly deserves.

It is paradoxical that putting one's whole self into music-making makes the result more universal. No matter how stylistically correct, by-the-book performance limits access to the initiated. However correct or incorrect I am engaged in the performance when I sense that the performer has her heart in it, right this minute.

This is what makes reading music so profoundly difficult. When do we become confident that we have reached that level of recognition through the medium of printed music? For me it has taken a lifetime, especially in regard to Mozart, the composer with whom I first felt rapport on a one-sound-at-a-time basis. Pretty direct.

Perhaps the emphasis on polite, middling responses comes from a simplistic notion of "music."

Thinking some more about how closely aversion is linked to its opposite and reminded once more of my wildly divergent reactions to sounds in Mozart--sometimes within a single phrase--I am mindful of the extent to which our training seems to favor polite responses. Nothing too out of the way, please.

Researching on-line I find not one single newspaper review of the two splendid, indeed life changing concerts I heard last weekend. It must be that the press is afraid of challenges, which is somewhat understandable in that I, too, had misgivings about two evenings in a row devoted to music by a composer I have never found palatable.

Yet it was a recognized master pianist performing.

A bit more probing revealed an interview with Anderszewski about how he got involved with Symanowski. It was a powerful aversion to the music that drew him in. Perhaps because, being half Polish, a sense of responsibility to the culture of his country compelled him to pursue this aversion to a point where the music came alive.

I have always been struck by the power of aversion which I first felt within a single work by Mozart -- all the more startling because of the intense love surrounding it.