What could be better than being sixteen or twenty-one, playing great music and being totally aware, totally in command of what you are hearing so that you are free to respond to it as you play? That's not the way I recall playing at sixteen or twenty-one.

For me at that age it was a matter of going over what I knew, of repetition, not of discovery.

What gives these young students freedom to respond is that they were never led to believe that music is static, that it can or should be reliably repeated. OK, that's a luxury. But life, too, is a luxury.