The sounds of breath are familiar, close, giving us a glimpse into our inner self. But there's something jumping around in front of the window to our soul, blocking the view, and distracting us. Our minds - mercurial little menaces. They leap around, they leap ahead, they jump off our ox cart slow body just when we need them - they never settle, and we can't control them. Our mind doesn't do boring, or background - it has to leap to the foreground, it has to upstage everyone, and it's never fussed to finish anything before it flutters ahead. That's how the mind evolved - the most powerful survival tool. Our minds play with words, ignorant of their deep meaning, like monkeys playing with jewels. Another simile: Our mind sits at a desk, while new file after new file is dumped on top of the still unread files already lying there - each new file always more urgent than the previous. What would it be like to have no files on the desk in front of you? Just you......and nothing.....? You couldn't stand it.....quick, turn the radio on, say something, do something! Silence is unsettling. A tiny baby (I'm assuming we were all one of those once) is pre-programmed to scream for attention when things go quiet. Silence is dangerous.

I wonder if the healing power of music rests somewhere in its ability to quieten the mind, to stop it leaping around, and, for a few moments at least, allow your whole body to tune into deeper feelings, feelings that are easily damaged if you try to detach them, fold them into word packages and send them to someone else. (Of course, music can also do the opposite - I'll come back to that later.) And there are other ways to discover this quietening. During long distance swimming or running, the mind can be led to gradually and naturally focus on the breath. Then, as the breath balances itself to the body's real needs, not the needs sparked up by the fretful mind, a feeling of wholeness arises. The mind has been drawn away from that clutter of files - leaving just one, the file with the label 'Being Alive' - a very thin file containing one blank sheet of paper. Meditation practices that focus on breathing work in a similar way. The simple miracle here lies in the way those files aren't shoved off the desk or shredded, they remain, they are not magicked away, but the mind's perspective on them is changed - the desk widens and there's space to tidy them.

In sweet music is such art, / killing care and grief of heart / Fall asleep, or hearing die. That Shakespeare quote is carved in the lintel of the portico to the music department at my old school. Like so much Shakespeare, and other great art, there's something ambiguous and enigmatic about it - it refuses to define, it refuses to compartmentalise - which has gently prodded my mind all my life: Is it me, or my hearing, that will die, if I don't listen carefully? Also, earlier in the song, Shakespeare tells how Orpheus' music will cause trees and mountains to bow down, plants and flowers to look up - as if it were 'lasting spring'. I'm never sure if Shakespeare expects me to die, or enjoy lasting spring.

What about when we allow music to have the opposite effect? Music's power can turn on us. It can drive us forward, over-riding sensible thoughts, blotting out consideration - urging you up onto the dance floor to make contact with that girl (to spread a few genes) - urging you up onto the battle field to make contact with that bullet (to fulfil the personal myths of our leaders). If we drop our guard, music can control us. It can hijack the rhythms of our body. At every point in our life, in supermarkets and restaurants, at political rallies and in religious rituals, we allow music to manipulate us - to buy things, do things and feel things, that we would have rejected if we had sat in reflective silence.

I'm not sure where these ideas are going.....as you might have already clocked. It's the image of the cat that holds my attention. Something to do with a quality of listening. A cat sits quietly. Ears alert. In the group, but always looking outwards. Aware, but not thinking. Knowing, but without ideas. Not compartmentalising. Whole - no duality. Is that something that you and I are able to do? Maybe. But the mind has to be calmed - not suppressed or controlled. If it feels restriction it'll struggle vigorously, like a cat that doesn't want to be picked up and held, as if its very life depended on escaping. Can we listen with that feline openness? Is sensible thought possible without pre-conceived ideas to follow? Or, is wonderful wide-eyed awareness destroyed as it skids into the tramlines of an agenda? Can a critic listen in this way, if he has an 'angle' to find, and he has to create 'hooks' to capture his readers' attention? Can an academic listen like this, if he has a dissertation to create, a point to make? Can I listen like this when I am playing, when I have so much to think about, so many lines hooking my concentration (and while I'm dressed in thick sweaty clothes and forced to sit on a chair like the Albert Hall ones, neither clothes nor chair ever designed for playing the cello, or any other musical function). I think this is where I'm going: I'm a garrulous old codger, importunately pressing conversation on you as I prop up the bar, and I'm asking, "Do we, who go on and on doing all the talking about music, simply miss the point?"

I've often wondered why hundreds of thousands of folk will go to huge outdoor classical concerts, bearing basket loads of festive food, often to happily endure sitting long hours in rain and midges, relishing the camaraderie of interminable loo queues. These concerts usually end with 1812-type cataclysmic firework celebrations. Or why millions will go to pop, rock and folk festivals - camping out, rejoicing in the mud - craft stalls selling homemade food, homespun clothes, and prehistoric survival equipment.....? A Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan concert will sell out in hours, at hundreds of pounds a ticket - without a penny being spent on publicity. Is it that we need a hero - that free spirit, that rebel, that great hunter - to stand up in front of us, telling out our story, uniting us in our shared journey and emotions? A massive tribal affirmation? One critic carped about us having presenters at Listen Here. That's the point - we need that focal figure. In April, sixty thousand people wanted to see the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela at the Festival Hall, 25 percent first time concert goers - were they looking for new subtleties of interpretation? Harmony or hormones? Clunk! That's my problem: We are playing the same music as these guys, and we're desperately looking for a bigger audience. For 'audience' read 'relevance'? Of course we can't just imitate the Bolivars - that would be stupidly shallow, if not impossible. They have a fantastic story to tell - which radiates from their performance. The West East Divan players have a fantastic story to tell - profoundly meaningful - the beating heart of what music is about. I don't have a fantastic story to tell - in this profession I'm the nearest thing to a boring old fart. But anyway, I am at the very least a member of the human race, and, like you, I'm wired into all that stuff I was just talking about.

We're proud of the range we covered at Listen Here. For me, that range fires me up and keeps me fresh. Improvisation is fast composition - composition is slow improvisation - who cares? It's the story that counts. Does it grip us, is it intelligible? Can the notes be random? Remember those kids' paintings that fooled the art critics? Remember the musically 'illiterate' Goldie conducting in 'Maestro'? Maybe he is more musically literate than us, because he's tuned into the essentials? He feels it, whatever 'it' is, and he's got a story to tell. How many great musicians, from any corner of the world, went to music college? Music education is such a recent invention. Is it helping? But, at this advanced stage in my career, I'm more than ever conscious of the competition we face. When I started we used to play 'studio concerts' - in an empty studio, and with retakes only allowed in the case of a genuine musical disaster. We've had to compete with CD saturation - forced to ratchet up our standard to keep up with the artificial standards of CDs. Now we compete with musical specialist groups - cherry picked players like the Bolivars and Divans, the John Wilson band (did you see the MGM Prom they did?), the EC Chamber Orchestra, early music specialists - to name but a few. I want to sound like them. Will we, can we, in our turn, in orchestras like the SSO, inspire that Bolivar spirit in the young kids of Big Noise in Stirling, and all the Venezuelan Sistema projects now springing up around the world? Will sixty thousand want to see them?

Margaret Hodge might, and I only say 'might', have struck an important note when she infamously criticised even the Proms for being exclusive. The Proms are wider reaching, more open, all embracing, and more successful than ever - don't dare say otherwise. The Prom audience is famously 'up for it' - whatever is on the menu. But maybe she had a point, a vein of truth in a lower stratum. Following on from my scribbling above, I'm suggesting that music has evolved out of a tribal rite, a celebration of 'us-ness'. Neuro chemicals triggered by music are associated with bonding, acceptance and forgiveness. Obviously there are other functions - celebration of skill, physical prowess, artistic and intellectual discovery, the scintillating effect of a huge group unanimously performing feats of stunning complexity, the physical resonance and visceral feel of orchestral sound.....whatever else grabs you.....but you can't disconnect from the tribal bit any more than you can give up being human. Your choice of music identifies you with your group, and your group gives you your sense of identity, and the strength that comes from that. Weighty words are uttered about the universality of music - yes, but are they the sort of clever words, like so many words, that sound good, but simply miss the deeper, inexpressible truth? A thought experiment: What would be different if the Divans did the Last Night of the Proms? What would it feel like if they played, or if they missed out, the Pomp and Circumstance stuff?

Sometimes, when a conductor says something particularly arresting, a player notes it on their copy. In 1984, when George Hurst was rehearsing the Rosamunde music (which we played last Thursday), he expostulated, "Bugger the bloody conductor", and that was duly noted in the 2nd desk cello part. What did he mean....? My informed guess is that he was trying to tell us we wouldn't get the essential and elusive lightness, dancing and crying, by watching the bloody conductor. So, what is needed? Andrew Manze gave us a clue: Imagine the musicians who'd been booked to play Schubert's Rosamunde - every day of their lives was spent playing menuets and contradances, hack music by indifferent composers, trivialities to titillate the bored bourgeoisie. The poor players were jaded. (Rightly so - professional musicians should never be expected to do that.) Then, one day, they find themselves playing Schubert's sublime ballet music. Did they notice the difference? Did we, last Thursday......? "Wow, this is something else". And that thought started me musing over the enigma of Schubert's Unfinished.

But first, I'd like to take a stroll into the maze of Schubert's life. What did the world look like from inside Franz? He suffered from depression. He couldn't hold down a job, he lived off handouts from friends. He needed money for food, which meant that dubious characters could easily buy ringside seats at the arena of his genius..... Stop! We're already far enough into this maze of dysfunction. We don't know forwards from backwards. We hesitate - depressed. Hope evaporates - tomorrow disappears from view. We push comfort aside and snarl with disbelief and derision. Joy inverts - white is black, like a negative photo. But tomorrow does come, and the cold clinging fog of despair evaporates in the sun, as if it never existed. Black becomes white again. This is his life. This is life for thousands. Tasks can't be finished. New ideas hijack our attention, each new idea promising to blot out the recent pain. (In the west, depression is the second most costly and disruptive illness, and there is no consensus within the NHS on how to treat it). Listen 'in' to Schubert - he's sitting in the middle of his maze singing his story for you. Let's get back to the Unfinished: The most famous tune, the second subject in the first movement (played by the cellos, of course) isn't really a tune - or is it? Well, it's the tune that everybody can recognise and sing........but this is a strange tune - it doesn't finish, it doesn't resolve - it disintegrates, droops, goes all uncertain, gasps to a halt. Silence. A whole bar of nothing. Not quite enough time for the audience to think, 'Hey, what's going on here'. Not quite enough time to get embarrassed and fidget, like the audience did as the Bach fugue petered out. Perhaps this silence is the loudest cry in this symphony. If you love Schubert, then accompany him down in this silence - and keep quiet, don't try to 'make it all nice' for him. This melancholy stasis is goaded away by a soulfully raging chord - a heaving groan of frustration. Halfway through the movement, in the part called the development, the opening cello and bass tune is repeated (Andrew asked us to use a "private vibrato" here, to create a type of sound that won't reveal anything to the audience). This time the tune proceeds on, and on, but downwards into uncertainty. Heart wrenched to a standstill, it can't even find the beautiful melody with which it joined hands at the opening of the movement. It fades from sight, lost in a deathly vale that echoes with strident searching blasts. Then, the first three notes of that theme emerge, only the first three steps, crying out, circling inward on themselves, seemingly entrapped, unable to take that fourth step outwards. Listen to this music. Listen 'in' to it - it's Franz's view out.

Do you wonder he didn't return to it? He had opened a window to his soul. He knew the corbie critics would preen themselves as they vied with each other, noting his aberrations from correct sonata form? But he was a genius - don't try to persuade me that he wasn't aware how exceptional this music was. Maybe he started the scherzo in good faith - but, having nearly finished it, he saw the awful truth - whatever he wrote detracted from what had gone before. Would he want to return to this self-revealing music? Like Sibelius struggling with his eighth symphony, he himself had set the bar too high. Or would he want to risk those jaded menuetting musos tramping all over it, clock-watching to catch the pub before closing? He wanted to pull that window shut. I say he was glad to let it disappear into a friend's junk pile - an irritating self seeking 'friend', deaf and blind to its value.

The mood lifts a little in the second movement. We catch a glimpse of serene beauty. Sir Donald Tovey, a great performer and academic (well able to finish Bach's fugue) founded and conducted the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh. The second subject of this second movement, first on the clarinet, then the oboe, is introduced by an ethereal violin arc and then a gently rocking accompaniment. At that point, whenever Tovey was conducting it, his lower lip would begin to quiver, and then, as the clarinet started, the tears would flow - each and every time, rehearsal and performance. He didn't get that from the 'Teach yourself conducting' book. John McInulty, the principal cellist when I joined, related this to me. That anecdote, muttered to me while some conductor was searching for a good gesture, inspired me more than all Tovey's famous essays on musical analysis (and I had read them all).

The Unfinished rarely makes it out of the first half of the programme onto the elevated stage of the second half......the audience has to be given good money's worth out of a concert. Is this how we should treat this music? When I'm a famous impresario, I'll present the Unfinished in its two movement form (that's complete - not in any four movement aberration) as the only piece in the concert - and charge you double. ........and maybe I'll just stop at that silence.....

These are a few signposts that have caught my eye. This is a miraculous symphony. Actually, God listens to it on his iPod when he wants to chill out. He doesn't hanker after a happy clappy ending - he knows better. It would have been so easy for Schubert to 'finish' the symphony in the way we say he might have done - but he didn't. That's the point - he didn't. Does this suggest a simpler explanation of the enigma? Isn't the obvious answer that he didn't want to? Incidentally, the second subject of the first movement of his quintet in C (played by the two cellos) is one of the most sublime moments in all music - many have said this is what they want to hear as they die. I have visions of hundreds of musicians arriving at the pearly gates, and with this melody ringing out, Saint Peter says, "OK, it's the Schubert again, you can let this one in". God casts a knowing, wry smile at the folk arguing about how things should be finished. God does enigmas like we do crosswords.

Have you clocked the Beeb's big poetry binge - I've never seen so much 'high culture' (why do we use that phrase?) being made so accessible and entertaining - how useful is that? Amongst the plethora of programmes, 'Why Poetry Matters' by Griff Rhyss Jones had me howling with laughter.....even shedding a discrete tear. Griff is useful, poetry is useful. But they're all useless, meaningless, null and void, unless someone actually uses the poetry (that'll be you and me?). Dead poets, deceased parrots......what will bring them to life? Here's Griff's answer: "It must happen for us now, it must call up emotions we've always had". Could that be the definition of 'useful' that I seek?

I can't tell you how many compositions of dubious use I've played in my career. Nobody wanting to play it....nobody wanting to hear it.....even conductor and producer not wanting to do it......failing to arouse even a tentative twitch of emotion...... except irritation. The Beeb, slewing between the slalom sticks of commercialism and public accountability, carries a sacred duty to achieve a balance, and give us lots of useful stuff. Radio 3's job is to support minority interests, to satisfy our several proclivities - but who judges usefulness - does the assessment and feedback stage ever go awry - how is usefulness going to be assessed? Radio 3 has just won Sony's Radio Station of the Year award - that's useful. Here's another question for you to chew at: Is it right that classical music should be ghettoised to a minority station, shunted off to a siding? Could classical music ever be mainline?

Simon Rattle has championed Maw, and, being interviewed on Music Matters, he said that Maw's time is coming, because "music has taken a different turn". Music to my ears. What is that different turn? Music managements are reassessing what we play and how we present it - though this might merely be for commercial reasons - but that's enough to change direction. We've got to engage with you, the audience. We've got to win you over, to tumble you. Are you willing? (Yeah, I know, if you're reading this, you'll have signed up to classical music anyway.) And what about us players, the musical navvies: is it possible that we have abrogated responsibility? Ours but to do and die. We just sit there and play what we are told to play. Today's menu is already forgotten as we prepare tomorrow's. We just about get enough time to learn the notes, we rarely get a chance to live ourselves into the music, to discover its inner richness - assuming that there's richness to want to discover. Worse, if there's a risk of having to reveal our true feelings, we tend to dissemble. As a tribe, we tend to shun showy presentation. This inscrutability might easily be confused with sophisticated artistry - or is it just a useful get out? Doing it every day, we might easily lose sight of why we're doing it in the first place. Come to think of it, why are we?

Anne Akiko Meyers was playing the Barber violin concerto with us last week. What a piece! I've worn out records of it. What a player! Listening to her was a highlight (not to mention watching her.....and being paid for it......!) What a range of emotion it contains - do you roll over for those emotions, like I do. She plays with consummate artistry, and all the requisite exquisite show biz wotsits. And for an encore, she drew a gasp by playing another contemporary piece - Somewhere over the Rainbow by Harold Arlen and E Y "Yip" Harburg. This has been lauded as the 'the best song ever'. And that's how she played it. Was this useful? The book 'Wizard of Oz' has been lauded as the greatest American fairy tale. Slow down! Do I sniff a whiff of condescension wafting in the air between us? Is this stuff 'real' literature or 'real' music? Is this fairy tale as useful as the old ones, which are 'real'? Well, is it any more or less manufactured and artificial than fairy tales by the Grimms or Anderson, the Kallevala, or MacPherson's Ossian (beloved by no lesser folk than Mendelssohn and Goethe)? Stephen Johnson, glowing golden from his own personal Sony award, was 'Discovering' Stravinsky's Firebird with us on Monday. No doubt about the greatness of that fairy tale. It got me comparing: Who's the biggest baddie - the wizard of Oz, or Katshchei of the Firebird? Katshchei, the shadowy metaphor living in our own mental underworld, who turns our emotions to stone. Or the wizard of Oz, who's like the vapid autocrats we're so quick to trust (the bankers?), or the fashion leaders who we allow to tell us what we think, or like our elected political leaders who screech their "manufactured animosities" (while we follow them to disaster). At least the wizard of Oz owned up, and showed us that we can walk freely out of our illusions. "Manufactured animosities" is a quote from Jeremy Paxman, from his harrowing programme about Wilfred Owen's poetry. Here's an interesting co-incidence: It was Britten's War Requiem that helped spring Owen's poetry out of obscurity, re-embodied it out of the void of unfashion. And now Owen is second most useful to Shakespeare for being studied in schools. That's very useful.

Another coincidence: 'Music Matters' was already interviewing Penderecki when the need arose to include an obituary for Maw. Penderecki dropped out of the avant garde in 1984 because he wanted his music to be useful - particularly for the Gdansk workers who were campaigning, and even dying, for basic political freedom. If he was to say anything, it had to communicate and be meaningful - both Maw and Penderecki rejected the avant garde. Years ago, the inimitable cellist Rohan de Saram played a studio performance of Maw's cello concerto with us - this grabbed me - this was a piece that should be taken to the Proms. I've never heard it since. It's expansive, accessible, and meaningful - what Griff would call an "authentic emotional experience". Was Maw the only composer to get shoved off the pavement in the rush for posh intellectualism and cerebral self abuse? Who else got wobbled off the path?

.......a question asked of every conductor by every school party to visit us - invariably given some waffly sort of answer. I've never heard a conductor able define his role - not Karajan, not Rattle - which might partly explain the hedge of edginess that grows around conductors. I mean, if they don't know what they're doing, how are we expected to? We didn't have one last week......conductor, that is. And it was lots of fun. Sacking the conductor so that the leader can do a self-drive job won't work with a full size orchestra; but prune us down to a chamber band, give us an inspirational leader like Liz, and it all works fine. We switch into a different mode. Some things are much easier - things like hearing and playing! Which is just as well, because in a small group everything you do is in the spotlight. There's no hiding.

This is not the first time I've burdensomely blogged at you about this, and it won't be the last. It's at the heart of practical music making. There's a mystery wriggling under this stone. But, a health warning: for any single explanation of things, there'll be plenty who will angrily disagree. When arguments don't go away, it's usually because we aren't asking the right questions, we're probably making the wrong assumptions, and we don't want to be shown up wrong.....and certainly not by the likes of you.......

Quite often, and more often noticeable in rehearsals, something akin to this happens in the orchestra. Suddenly - when the conductor is talking, only a few are listening (or would be if they could hear him), others are chatting about this or that, and some are finishing reading an interesting paragraph in their magazine - suddenly the conductor makes half a gesture, and lo, the whole orchestra does something absolutely together, perfectly balanced and satisfyingly musical. You get a lot of this with a self drive leader. Liz only gave a handful of conventional 'beats' in the whole concert; there was never any question of anyone beating time. And yet we played more together, and more musically than can normally be achieved. (No, we're not actually absolutely perfect all the time.) She did less explaining than most conductors seem to need. And that leads to an interesting example of all this (whatever 'this' is): quite often, when something isn't working, the conductor and the affected players start trying to analyse what's wrong, and how to fix it. We're all under pressure to get the music right, and so, urgently in the precious rehearsal time, we start trying to 'fix' how we're going to make it nice and right and safe - we switch to a rational and analytical mode - which immediately makes the music stiff and clunky and awfully unmusical. The wrong mode. Everyone gets irritated, bored with the conductor's talking, and the conductor wishes he hadn't said anything (except those who just love the sound of their own voice) - the point seems to have been missed - the wrong question got asked. Maybe we should just read magazines during rehearsals, and everything'll be fine.

There was a Karajan documentary on BBC4 recently. He was being quizzed about this sort of thing and he didn't want to be forced to define, or to be pinned down, so he became irritable (which is what conductors do) - so he said that the players have to "just play.....just play". He also used the flock of birds comparison. Radio 3's 'Music Matters' last week was a long interview with Simon Rattle, talking about his life with the Berlin Phil: the conductor can lead but not control, the players will play like a string quartet, which takes time and can't be quickly 'explained', he wants unalloyed passion, his need is to tell stories.... He said many other challenging things: British orchestras are not good at this sort of thing, nobody knows what a symphony orchestra will be in the 21st century, players fool themselves if they think they can stay in ivory towers, Berlin has the biggest Turkish community outside Turkey - engagement, engagement, engagement. He hasn't changed. His time with us ('78 to '80) was all too short: neither we nor the BBC were ready for him......how good it would be to see him back.......with a supply of magazines for us to read while he prattles on.