THERE IS a row brewing on the letters pages regarding the music of Mozart. It stems from a Weekend review by composer Raymond Deane of a new life of Mozart by Andrew Steptoe.

Mr Deane saw fit to denigrate much of Mozart's musical compositions as mere pot-boilers. He wrote that "In an age when classical music serves primarily as a means of reassurance for the middle classes, the regularity of Mozart's phrases, the tonic/dominant tick tock of his harmonies, and the repetitiveness of his cadential formulae offer stressed out music lovers the comforting illusion that music is easy composing by numbers evokes listening by numbers."

Not surprisingly, there have been objections to Mr Deane's evaluation. People have sprung to Mozart's defence, and to their own.

Still, it is hard to remain unimpressed with a review which not only gratuitously insults a large group of people (the middle classes), but also Grafton Street buskers, the composers Nyman and Glass ("hacks") and the book's author, who apparently writes well ("for a professor of psychology").

For good measure, Deane also managed to draw in the idealism of John F. Kennedy and the supremacy of French cooking, describing both as fantasies.

Right. What contribution can I make to the debate? Though I did reach Grade V on the pianoforte, and can compose myself when necessary, I am not, like Raymond Deane, a music composer.

But if I thought music was easy I would not find it a "comforting illusion". I prefer my musicians and composers to have suffered for their art and then to have died, preferably at an early age and in some pain (though not too much I am not a sadist).

The mythology is certainly tedious, but Mozart fits the bill. His short life in a vicious society was a little more than the series of "humdrum events" suggested by Raymond Deane.

Whether he died of acute rheumatic fever or kidney failure or poisoning doesn't matter much, but certainly his end was unpleasant, if we are to believe (and why shouldn't we?) the description written years later by his son Karl, seven at the time.

If I thought for one minute that the composer of whatever tune I happen to be listening to had a comfortable middle class life, sitting at home quietly, fire in the background, dinner cooking in the kitchen, attractive kids gambolling in the garden, it would completely spoil my enjoyment.

That is the whole point of listening to a composer like Mozart. His music is "easy listening in the best sense of the term.

What then, you may ask, constitutes "hard listening"?

It is a matter of opinion, but in some people's opinion the hardest of all hard listening might well involve performers such as Daniel O'Donnell, Foster and Allen and Charlie Landsborough. I know many people who would prefer to be sentenced to hard labour than to such hard listening.

All right. What about Raymond Deane's notion that composing by numbers evokes listening by numbers?

I cannot accept this unfair denigration of numerology in the world of music. Composing "by numbers" may be easy when the numbers involved are fairly limited when they expand, it becomes complicated, as does listening by numbers.

Say we were to look at the musical illusion of identity between rhythmic and intervallic ratios. For example, a perfect fifth can be expressed as two notes whose frequencies vibrate at the relative speeds of 2:3. Now if the interval were sufficiently slowed down, it would be audible as a rhythm of two against three.

But where does that get us? Yes, not very far only to the sort of banality Deane complains of, where you get the speed of each voice relating to the other in a ratio "derived" from that of the harmony (3:4:5 for a second in version tonic triad, 6:7:9 for a root position dominant minor, given an underlying purely tempered "C major)."

You will have guessed that I am thinking of the strange player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow. His Study No 40b for example consists of Study No 40a played against itself at its own tempo ratio probably the only piece of music in existence whose second movement is its first movement squared. And Study No 41c literally divides rather than multiplies the attractions of its two component pieces.

This is what you might call... difficult easy listening, and you can read all about it in Kyle Gann's The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, (Cambridge University Press, £45).