To the officials, busybodies and complainers of O'Hara, Squirrel Hill and anywhere else in the supposedly free world: It's music, for Pete's sake.

It's live music, too -- something that should be encouraged and celebrated, not threatened or squelched. But threats and bans of one kind or another are popping up in neighborhood after uptight neighborhood, triggered either by a failure to communicate or a failure to appreciate. Either problem, if unresolved, poses a real and significant loss.

The latest musical melee is an ongoing conflict in O'Hara over one couple's "house parties." As reported last Thursday, Cindy Harris and Rick Heath have been hosting four to eight small concerts in their home each year since 1997.

But since 2003 they've hosted the parties under a legal cloud. That's when an anonymous neighbor complained about all the extra cars, and an overzealous O'Hara zoning officer sent them a "cease and desist" letter asserting that living room concerts are prohibited under township zoning law. A January 2006 letter warned of a $500 fine for any subsequent violations.

I find this absurd. I cannot count the number of living room concerts I've attended in neighborhoods all over the country. The Sunday afternoons of my teenage years were spent in piano teachers' homes all along the Missouri-Kansas state line, playing and listening to other students play Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Copland. Weeknights in Washington, D.C., served the same purpose throughout college.

Scores of us swarmed those neighborhoods. We were preparing for concerts and competitions. It was serious business, but it wasn't business at all. It was art.

The same appears to be true in O'Hara, with one important difference: Concert guests make donations as they feel inspired. The most recent concert raised $325 for the township's Lauri Ann West Memorial Library.

If the purpose of these house concerts is not to make a profit, but simply to preserve, enjoy and pass on diverse musical traditions while doing a little good for local charities, it's hard to fathom why anyone would object -- even a neighbor irritated by the occasional congregation of cars.

I'd like to share a few choice words with that neighbor, every bit as much as I would with the pinheads near me at any given intersection whose car stereo systems are so loud they alter my heartbeat.

Noise pollution is a form of assault going nearly unaddressed in modern life. It's rarely if ever monitored and punished in traffic, and it's next to impossible to get Pittsburgh's short-staffed police departments to respond to such problems -- even those emanating from stationary homes.

That's what made a Squirrel Hill resident's recent predicament so remarkable: Matt Khoury checked first with police before hosting a small get-together of friends with guitars and bongos on a summer evening, but the police still came by to stop the music even though he wasn't breaking the law either through volume (low and unamplified) or timing (10 p.m. on a Friday night).

I don't know whether I'd give lower citizenship grades to Mr. Khoury's Beechwood Boulevard belly-aching neighbors or to Ms. Harris's Fox Point Drive fuddy-duddies. Intrusive noise shouldn't have been an issue in the former case; it hasn't even been mentioned in the latter.

Respect for the law is essential to civic life. But there's something troubling about a system of laws whose enforcers say, "You can only do on your property what we say you can do. If it's not on our list, it's not in your rights."

This has been a philosophical battleground since the country's founding. The Constitution's framers agonized over whether to draft a Bill of Rights, worried that future generations might assume rights they hadn't listed didn't exist. They wrote the Ninth Amendment specifically to address this potential problem: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Maybe Thomas Jefferson, a violinist and bon vivant, urged James Madison to include "making music" in the bill of rights; more likely, he and everyone else of pre-electronic times considered it a self-evident part of the pursuit of happiness.

But O'Hara officials assert that since "house parties" are not among the 22 permitted uses listed in their zoning code, they are not allowed. Neither, as Ms. Harris devastatingly points out, are prayer meetings or political fund-raisers.

I hope this O'Hara couple continues their legal fight, both for principle and for practice. I've been itching to wrap up construction at my house so we can host regular "musicales." Just as soon as pieces of the great room ceiling are no longer falling on guests' heads, we'll be kicking out the jams -- at a reasonable volume, of course, and for free.

But I'll take a tip from Pittsburgh's beleaguered music lovers, and I'll warn my neighbors first. Heck, I'll invite 'em -- they've been listening to our ceiling-crumbling practice sessions for years, without complaint.