Cover Page -- Title Page -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- Prologue -- I DIARY -- The Piano in My Life -- Of Vanity -- Being Ready -- Paris in the Spring -- Nantucket Diary, 1974 -- On Edmund White's States of Desire -- Setting the Tone -- Being Alone -- II PEOPLE -- Women in Music -- Misia -- Remembering Janet -- Cosima Wagner's Diaries -- Boulanger as Teacher -- Thomson as Teacher -- Messiaen and Carter on Their Birthdays -- When Paul Jacobs Plays Debussy -- Thinking of Ben -- Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich -- Boulez -- Cocteau and Music -- Vera Stravinsky's and Robert Craft's Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents -- Stravinsky at 100 -- An Auden -- Courageous Coward -- Shaw: The Great Composers -- III THE MUSICAL VOICE -- Teaching and Performance -- The American Art Song -- More Notes on Song -- Fauré's Songs -- The Mélisande Notebook -- Fauré and Debussy -- Considering Carmen -- Notes on a French Bias -- A Triptych Notebook: Reactions to the Theater Pieces of Ravel, Poulenc and Satie -- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Critic -- IV EARLY PIECES -- Writing Songs -- Song and Singer -- Listening and Hearing -- Composer and Performance -- Arthur Honegger -- The Beatles -- The Avant-Garde as Démodé -- Around Satie's Socrate -- Paul Bowles -- Remembering a Poet -- Remembering Green -- About the Author -- Index -- Copyright Page.