I Hear, Therefore I Am

In other words, because I hear as I hear I know that I am an individual.

Music lessons would be entirely transformed if their goal were to reinforce the integrity of the child's aural reality rather than to undermine it with the illusion that everyone should hear the same thing in the same way.

You might say that my whole life has been devoted to this proposition.  All of my insights into the works of the masters stem, not from others' playing, but from my own ear responding to what happens when I play what is indicated in the score.  At times this is baffling as the sound often defies both my expectations and theoretical analysis.

Sooner or later we bump into the piano. From the outset a source of remarkably variable resonances, composition for this instrument reflected the expansion of music into a new dimension, something akin to freeing the musical mind from alphabetic gravity.  (Imagine Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Clementi, Chopin orbiting out there, 200 years before everyone else. " Hi, guys! What took you so long!")