Sunday afternoon I heard a performance that illustrated beautifully my point about chickens and eggs. This was a young string quartet -- clearly nice people, unpretentious yet serious in a very convincingly youthful way. There were no flaws in their work. None, really. Except that the first violinist played, from time to time, ever so slightly out of tune with the others. Okay: I can attribute that to the adrenaline of being the leader.

But there were no moments of real fusion inside of the sound. The drama was all technical, not native to the instruments or the compositions.

As the elderly gentleman seated with me put it: Too much drama; not enough heart." I maintain that the "heart" part is what children dream about. I certainly had vivid childhood dreams about musical elements, very specific elements--also nightmares. Their power has lasted a lifetime: indeed, has sparked a lifetime of curiosity and intent pursuit of its underlying mystery.

Chickens ... eggs ... The way our culture thinks about music is that it has to be learned, technique first. But technique, at least on the piano, is taught very much the way the old Fred Astaire dance charts used to try to impart the art of dancing to total klutzes who didn't have a clue. In case you have never seen such a chart let me attempt a description. It showed basically the floor plan of a step, with outlines of the left and right foot shoes of a man and a woman with dotted lines and arrows indicating ... you guessed it.

No trace of body, no indication of a rhythm. Just shoes positioned in a diagram that might show where to put the sofa in relation to the coffee table.

But it doesn't work like that. Impulse counts for more than 90% of it. Impulse and an instrument translates directly into sound. Start with that and there is meaning.

Start the other way and count the days until it dries up.

Last night I went with a friend to a concert of compositions mostly by graduate students at an eminent conservatory. Performed by a skilled ensemble of roughly fifteen players with a full battery of percussion -- I love percussion!! -- it presented a range of styles written by composers from China, Italy and the US.

When it was over my friend asked: "What is the point? There was no evident feeling, nothing to remember. It all sounded more or less the same except for a few pings here and there in conspicuous places."

All I could think of was airport/drugstore/movie music -- the ambient noise music of our day. Is this where employment lies? Is that why so much energy is devoted to mastering this cold, cold art (to paraphrase the famous country/western lyric)?

Think for a moment about the real deal vs. phony baloney. It gets harder and harder to tell the difference, or rather the distinctions become more difficult to define as expertise abounds and content dwindles.

Thinking about how many note-perfect musicians the schools are churning out is mind-boggling. Pondering how many truly unforgettable performances I have heard from young musicians is mind-boggling in the opposite direction.

I pay a lot of attention to young performers (and heartily recommend that you do likewise) because they are the real windows into the present state of the art.

I start with the young children who study with me: Their notions of sound instruct my ear as to the state of music in our era. If you have occasion to hear young players of any age you might consider this mode of listening.

What a thrill when my sixteen-year-old began her lesson yesterday with an astute question about Beethoven's Op. 14 No. 1 Sonata in E: "Why does he start off the Development section as if he is going to stay in E then go off into C major?"

By the end of the lesson we had explored all the sharps of E major in relation to tones in the C major scale. I have long realized that Mozart writing in the key of C uses accidentals that tie C to E major--D# is not infrequent as a first accidental in pieces in C. It is as if Mozart is using E as a covert key while Beethoven uses C as the covert key.

What fun to see a young person excited about Beethoven through personal experience rather than by some kind of theoretical approach.

I often describe the difference between a D major and an E-flat major triad on the piano: the black-key major third in D causes the triad to be jarringly, ever-so-slightly out of tune, while the black-key tonic and dominant of the E-flat create the opposite effect.

A propos yesterday's post: I recall an eminent theorist speaking about the superior treatment by Schubert later in his life of a theme he had used earlier--the earlier setting in B-flat, the latet in A. The theme begins on and centers around the major third of the tonic triad. The speaker was nonplussed when I pointed out that it literally hurts me to play the theme in A, while in B-flat it has the opposite character.

Walking downstairs after the talk a fellow pianist confided her agreement with my observations.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus; but no, Virginia, despite what many theorists would have us believe, all tonalities on the piano--indeed, on most instruments, are not alike.

Just returned from a conference of music scholars, theorists and musicologists, I must say that I heard quite a few extremely stimulating papers. A couple of them stand out for their disregard of what it feels like to play the music being examined. This is a run-in I have had in the past, sometimes with quite eminent scholars.

According to visual analysis a piece is in the key that it is in. Seems obvious, doesn't it? Except that some keys are painful on the piano, while others are quite the opposite.

One of the papers was about Poulenc's setting of the Babar story. I have tried many times to play it and never succeeded in getting past the opening bars. There is something fundamentally disquieting about that music, though it looks calm enough. The lecturer seemed to believe it was full of nostalgia for the good old days of a comfortable bourgeois childhood. I say, "Nonsense." It embodies malaise--a malaise that penetrates every sound of this work.

I call that precision in composition. His early life was anything but comfortable, except perhaps to the casual observer.