I’ve been reading An Angel at my Table, the autobiography of New Zealand writer Janet Frame. It’s an unusual and absorbing read.

Janet Frame grew up without much access to music, but when she first came across classical music she loved it. Gradually she gathered some favourite pieces – Schubert’s song ‘An die Musik’, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony – and made them cornerstones of her music appreciation.

As a college student in 1945 she attended a lunchtime ‘recital’ of gramophone records chosen by Mr Forrest, a college tutor and record enthusiast.

‘One day when I decided to go to the recital and I was standing outside the door of the gramophone room, trying to pluck up courage to go in, I heard the piano being played. I opened the door and peeped in and there was Mr Forrest playing the piano. He stopped at once and prepared the records for the recital. But I had heard him playing the piano, up and down the keys in a flourish and swoop like a concert pianist, marshalling the notes together in a travelling force going somewhere, and not simply picking out notes into a ‘tune’, separating them and giving them no say in the whole music.’

I loved that – ‘marshalling the notes together into a travelling force going somewhere’. What a good description! We all know what it’s like to hear a performance which proceeds beat by beat or bar by bar, counting the way mechanically through the piece. By contrast, we know what it’s like when a performance evokes that exhilarating sense of things coalescing into a forward motion, a sense of direction and purpose in which individual notes are never lonely.

Daniel Barenboim once wisely said that ‘a musician must know how to group notes’. To group notes, yes – not just on the small scale but on the large scale, so that they become ‘a travelling force going somewhere’.