If you want to refine your sense of color you have to have colors to fool around with. I have always loved color but when I was a kid red was used for the war effort, not for fooling around. Nobody told me that until many years later. I noticed that what was supposed to be red was brown passing for red. How could I have said, "Hey! This isn't red!"
Now we have a similar thing happening with touch on the piano. With less and less exposure to real, live, subtle piano sound kids think that all there is to it is touching the keys on the piano. Hopefully one day they will hear someone play who makes a real sound with fuzzy edges, not just metallically clean. I'm talking about the kind of sound that contemporary composers miss and are supplying by doubling the piano with vibraphone of all things.
