What is music? Where does it come from? What makes something "musical"? Lately what I've heard has been sending these questions reeling through my mind.

For instance, what do I make of Claire Bloom, who's been appearing at the ART in Long Day's Journey into Night, but who took one of her nights off to offer Cambridge a taste of another one of her recent projects, Women in Mind: New Musical Melodramas? Three contemporary composers were commissioned to revive an old and neglected form, the melodrama, which has examples in Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, where a speaker recites to a musical accompaniment. Her texts included personal and public passages from Virginia Woolf, Walter de la Mare's puzzling semi-autobiographical narrative Miss Duveen, and passages from Jean Rhys (evocatively seedy and brilliantly depressing), Elizabeth Hardwick, and Colette. The composers were Lee Hoiby, Ned Rorem, and Robin Holloway (none of the music was by women, though most of the words were). Bloom's accomplished but reticent accompanist and collaborator was pianist Brian Zeger, a Harvard graduate in English currently on the Juilliard and Mannes faculties.

Music emerged from Bloom's crystalline diction and from her bewitching range of vocal timbres from dulcet to down-and-dirty. The accompaniment, however, added little or (in the case of the Hoiby) nothing. Most of it sounded like salon music, sometimes clever (Holloway at least included some interplay between voice and piano), but it might just as well have been taking place in another room. Occasionally, the composer just gave up and let Bloom speak. As an encore, Bloom and Zeger did selections from Eric Satie's delicious Sports et divertissements, musical settings of his own series of witty, epigrammatic texts (often animal fables), and though they were in a lighter vein, you could suddenly see that when words and music are inextricably integrated, this is a form that's worth exploring.

I tried to get to the Fourth of July Pops concert on the Esplanade, but when I called the MDC for a press pass I was told that they were "running out of credentials" (something people have been saying about the MDC for years, but evidently not in the way this was meant). Someone was supposed to get back to me but didn't. I couldn't get near the concert, but I watched Ken Clark's astonishing fireworks display from a Marlborough Street rooftop, with a boombox tuned to WCRB-FM, which was broadcasting the concert (though it never identified either the music or the performers, as seems to be its latest wont). Because of the long rain delay, the continuing weather threat and -- no doubt -- the pressure of a national telecast (on the Arts & Entertainment cable network), the concert itself had to be abbreviated. The 1812 Overture consisted only of its famous cannonade finale (with chorus) -- an expedient compromise of negligible musical consideration or value.

The fireworks themselves, though (five minutes less of them than last year's 28-minute display), were a symphony of contrasting textures, tempos, colors, and patterns (including such "botanical" formations as Chrysanthemums, Peonies, Silver Palm Trees, and Willows along with Peace signs, Golden Hourglasses, multicolored "Sky-mines," and Circles Surrounding Stars). Fountains of Roman candles letting fly from the barge in the Charles River were a comic Scherzo punctuating the more heroic "movements." At one climactic point, a magnesium illumination lit up the entire Boston cityscape, reflecting in the windows of office buildings and condos.

Clark is the world's leading pioneer in the computerized synchronization of fireworks to specific musical phrases, but he has never been asked to do any synchronization on the Esplanade beyond the finale of the 1812 Overture. Yet I could swear passages mirrored precise moments of the Handel Royal Fireworks Music and Bernstein Candide Overture that were playing on the radio. Clark's fireworks don't need music. They are music -- music for the eye.

(In an interview on A&E's late-night rebroadcast, entrepreneur David Mugar -- to whose foundation all Americans with TV sets can be grateful for footing the bill for this national treasure -- seemed to take personal credit for this event without ever mentioning Clark and his company, Pyrotechnology, who have been doing the Esplanade fireworks since 1984, and who are singularly responsible for its special distinction.)

The opening-night concert of the Newport Music Festival's 28th season also got off a late start. Director Mark P. Malkovich talked too much and too sentimentally ("Music," he said, was nothing less than a "love fest") and thanked corporate sponsors and other dignitaries some 15 minutes past the announced 9 p.m. starting time. But Malkovich, bless him, has brought to New England some of the world's greatest musicians, especially pianists -- and never merely because they have big names.

This year's opening-night master was the 69-year-old Italian artist Sergio Fiorentino, who was making his first return to this country since his Carnegie Hall debut 43 years ago. In 1953, Fiorentino was winning awards and touring the world. He survived a plane crash, but a spinal injury essentially ended his concert career. He made several recordings and taught at the Naples Conservatory. Then, when he retired, he began to perform again, and with extraordinary results.

This concert at the Breakers was similar to programs he did three years ago in Hamburg, recordings of which have been released on a two-CD album on the British Appian label. In person, this small, elegant, dignified man makes the playing seem even more remarkable. Effortlessly and stone-faced, he produces overpowering tone of enormous -- one might even say moral -- authority. His technique is phenomenal. It's hard to escape the term "Golden Age," because few people -- perhaps no one else -- alive today have this particular lost combination of the heroic and the exquisite.

The first half of the program was Fiorentino's arrangement of Busoni's arrangement of Bach's great D-major Organ Prelude and Fugue, in which the simple process of left hand answering right (four-note phrases, later more surprising seven-note phrases) created an increasingly intense and complex sort of tolling (George Herbert's "Church bells beyond the stars heard"), a sound of gathering in, of staking a territory, of calling us all together, and -- most important -- gathering us in.

What followed was the major work of the evening, the Schumann C-major Fantasie, in a performance that was unforgettable -- uncanny -- in its play between the inward and the outward drama. The first movement began with a quiet weaving of some story (Schumann as Sheherazade), a suspenseful tale of bravery and romance that becomes increasingly personal: Schumann's own story, of course. The quiet resolution is shattered by a heroic and ceremonial march on the grandest scale, which is in turn interrupted by another passage of contemplation and conversation, which leads to greater agitation and a freer play of imagination. Fiorentino ended the movement with a cast-of-thousands finale that roused the audience to applause. But the slowly paced gentle quietude of the last movement seemed even more daring. Fiorentino took his time, spinning out strands of pearls and diamonds in delicate, rippling accompaniment to a plaintive song, almost a lullaby, that evolved into a song of sadness and loss. Reminiscences of great deeds past subsided again into an acceptance and finally, with the last three chords, an affirmation of the inner life, a reminder that all we have of value is the song of that inner life.

After an extended intermission (drinks under the tent on the Breakers' grand patio), Fiorentino returned with something equally extraordinary -- a breathtaking and dazzling sequence of waltz transcriptions, paraphrases, caprices, and metamorphoses, in which his hummingbird trills, stupefying octave runs, and climactic Chico Marx glissandos were actually only the beginning of what he was impressing us with. Like those Golden Age pianists (and I'm especially reminded of Rachmaninov, whose recordings, Fiorentino says, meant more to him as a student than his actual conservatory lessons), he really knows what a waltz is (and knows the operas and operettas they come from), so he can play with one's expectations with either teasing wit or gentle nostalgia (as in his own "paraphrase" of waltzes from Richard Strauss's Die Rosenkavalier), or (as in Liszt's version of the Waltz from Gounod's Faust) with the most radical mood shifts between diabolical ferocity and aching tenderness. In Godowski's Symphonische Metamorphosen on Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus, Fiorentino gave us a nightmare vision -- half comic -- in which those famous waltz tunes surface as almost ungraspable snippets before they are lost again in a hall of mirrors, or buried in some inebriated, maniacal whirlwind of elusive memory.

Fiorentino's one encore, at 11:22 p.m., was, appropriately, a racing, breathless, bravura rendition of Chopin's Grande Valse Brillante. You could hardly say that in his amazing hands any of this waltzing was less "serious" as musicmaking than the Bach or Schumann.

Let me leave you with one last musical recollection. Last month, pianist Russell Sherman played a recital at the Harvard-Epworth Church to honor the retirement of its beloved pastor, Reverend Edward Mark. A previous engagement forced me to miss the first half of the concert. Sherman began the second half with a complex, quasi-heroic rendition of Brahms's late Intermezzo, Opus 116 No. 6, that served as an introduction to his magnificent Brahms Paganini Variations, out of which he created a stunningly unified drama of radical alternatives. I arrived just before the end of the first half, to hear from behind the closed door of the nave -- as if through a veil -- the final calm, comforting variations of Beethoven's Opus 109 Sonata. It was like some reassurance from another world, another dimension, the place of pure spirit where the greatest music comes from and to which it aspires.