There stood the Clementi exercise, looking like clockwork: scales up, scales down, parallel motion, contrary motion.

Here sat an attentive 16-year-old with a cultivated ear, feeling her way through the scales one at a time, first one hand then the other, commenting on how beautiful each was, or how odd.

It was, to my mind, an ideal lesson in technique: you get your hand to model the sounds you hear as the scale unfold--quite unlike repeating formulas of tone and of fingering.