Let's Hear It for Wrong Notes!

Today I had a revelation.  A young adult student who struggles with reading but whose ear is tops tops tops was making his way through a highly complex Beethoven minuet.  After 16 bars I asked him to show me where he had made errors.  The first one he noticed was not the first one I would have mentioned, but he was right.

It took a few minutes to figure out what had caused his error.  It was the first sound in which A did not appear, the tone which had been continuous in one octave or another since the beginning of the piece. 

I take this as a sign of just how well coordinated this man is in terms of his auditory / mental process, which is one of the hardest things to tap into once one has been trained to do vision-first reading.