In yesterday's New York Times was an article about having to disguise research on music as research on "complex nonlinguistic auditory processing." If ever there was evidence that music is alien to our culture this is surely it.

Now the problem is more subtle. Music is OK, provided it is written music. The purely oral aspects of music are not reliable. Thus, jazz is OK as long as it is by the book. That's why so much of it sound alike.

Musical sound exists simultaneously in several dimensions: in addition to time there are verticality and horizontality. Verticality is a function of overtones. These depend on timbre, among other things. A cappella voices, string quartets and certain well-tuned wind ensembles not in equal temperament produce clear vertical blends. The horizontality expresses tension against the vertical, an example of which is the so-called blue note of jazz, produced by the clarinet playing just slightly under pitch.

Some people believe that the piano furnishes a model of neutral pitch: I heard one conservatory graduate student say that the piano has "no overtones." How did he come to that conclusion? Or was he merely mimicking a non-fact he had been force-fed in an effort to avoid confusion?

I hear many pianists attempt to block overtones by humming loudly while playing or by playing always with the soft pedal. Not hearing the overtones is like being told to sit in the corner and not think about a big brown bear.

In one of my singing groups we encountered a problem common to ensemble music-making: One of the singers was singing the wrong vowel. While everyone else was producing Oh she persisted in Oooo. The sound was not in tune. It turned out she was obsessing about her attack. But the point in group singing is that there is no individual attack: a group intention produces the in-tune sound. How to agree on that? Simple: Look around; match the facial preparation of your fellow singers, and the vowel will come out in agreement.

To do this you have to tolerate losing control of your individual sound, in a way, of your individual will.

Concerts are full of such refusals to become part of a whole.

Then there is the opposite: equally upsetting. Too much blend at the expense of individual passion in linear playing. This requires some sophisticated musicianship and the appropriate setting. A string quartet is not an a cappella singing group.

The trouble with piano study based on technique only is that listening is ipso facto left to someone else. This is not only demeaning for the student, as it denies the validity of the student's own ear, but it is grossly unfair to the composer.

Yesterday I had the experience of playing a Brahms duo sonata that I have heard and played many times. This time I decided to take Brahms's notation seriously and vowed to respect his note values as indicative of actual sound "values," so to speak. It was a different piece.

Among the more potent discoveries: 1) Rests, as in Mozart, are most often not pauses but indications of interrupted sounds.
2) Bass notes in extremely low registers affect the intonation of the clarinet and the ear of the pianist. (Am I alone to have found them problematic all my life?)
3) Much of what we accept as standard Brahms interpretation is simply the result of not paying attention: this music is incredibly multi-layered.

Boredom or inattentiveness, as usual, proved to be reliable guides in discerning the places that needed closer examination.

Reading music is so much easier if one can read and listen at the same time--which very few of us can when we are starting out. I give priority to the listening aspect of reading; it takes longer to achieve a synthesis but the results are more fun. What's wrong with fun!

The article on pitch in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is quite revealing: It seems that there was no such thing as standard pitch until well past the Baroque era. Voices sang where they were centered, the way I like to have my vocal tuning classes work. Introducing fixed pitch became the practice as instruments were added in to fill out the sound. Even then there were deviations from a given pitch.

It would be good, I think, instead of arguing about whether A should be 415 or 440 to postulate A's of all different frequencies. Incidentally, that's why a lot of Renaissance vocal music is available in modern editions in a wide variety of keys, some of which make no sense at all to me, like F# major. I have nothing against F# major but it is not a tonality in which people ordinarily sing, whereas F is, as is G.

Another "scientific" study was described in yesterday's paper that purported to show that people who had had some musical training responded differently to pleasing sounds than those who had not. Perhaps the study shows something altogether different: Perhaps it reveals that people are no longer singing, training or no.

Voices "true" instinctively. Responding to overtones is a natural occurrence, no training required--in fact, usually the less the better.

Pitch, like so many other things, is being mechanized to a point where it no longer is recognizable. The piano, ubiquitously (and wrongly, in my opinion)used as the arbiter of pitch, supports this tendency. Alas.