Models or the Real Thing?

Already as a very young girl I had an awareness of "the real thing."  An interesting notion: That an unschooled child could have a notion of what that might be.

The plastic toy that looked like a sailboat but which, contrary to my excited expectations, sank was clearly not it.  The neighbor's spinet with no model attached either in print or in the person of a piano player was the real thing and has remained so for my entire life.

It was me and that sound with no intermediary.

When, then, specific sounds composed by someone who had lived 200 years earlier awoke in me a recognition that we were reacting to the same thing I knew it was real.

Lessons, classes, required recitals, had, for the most part nothing to do with it.  They conveyed rules, models, competition, categorical judgments--all beside the point.