Why does a piano need to be kept in tune?

I hope you don't think this is a purist talking. I am one of those people who believe that a musician should be able to make music on a shoe. But a child does not have that power.

My definition of precision includes a child's ear. For a child a key on the piano is associated with a sound so specific that if it does not match the sound produced by a corresponding key on a different instrument the child will be disoriented--perhaps unable to play.

One of my students is disoriented when he touches my intune piano after playing his own instrument. If he played more consistently he would notice sooner that it is out of tune and perhaps say something, though he is shy and doesn't readily make demands.

If you are going to have a piano and if you expect your child to play it you simply must keep it in tune. If you really don't believe how important this is, I suggest that you take all the rulers in your home and bend them ever so slightly just to see what happens.

One of my young students is a "natural." What do you think that means?

It might be simpler to contemplate what it doesn't mean. She does not have physical facility: playing the piano does not come easily to her - she can't just sit down and rattle things off.

But her grasp of musical process is profound and entirely self-generated. She is responsive to the tiniest subtleties of timing and tone. For example, she knows that vocal sound and piano pitch are not the same; she even said at one point (with considerable anguish) that she found this "confusing." (It is!)

For her music is too central to be on display all the time. She is the kind of child who dreams music.

I have taught others who, like her, get fascinated by certain songs and continue to work on them over long periods of time--really work on them, not just repeat the same thing over and over.

The challenge in teaching such a child is to get her to trust the depth of her gift so that she does not let it get steam-rolled by competition, which is just another word for conformity.

What do you do when you really don't like a piece you have set out to learn?

Not liking and liking a lot are two aspects of the same thing. In music they are a reliable basis for what is sometimes thought of as interpretation. (I think it's more basic than that, but that's a long story.)

For starters, translate "I don't like it" as "I don't get it." Narrow down what it is you don't like: is it this note? that interval? Imagine that they are alive and that you, being in charge, can approach them so that they reveal themselves to you. Imagine they are dogs that look threatening and that you are intent on getting them to wag their tails.

The piece will take on what I think of as a plot line. You still might not really like it but you will probably, after this effort, be at least intrigued.

Two revealing quotations from a day's teaching, both in response to my questioning why it is worth the trouble to work in extreme detail on "easy" passages:

"Because it is so much more interesting to listen to."

"Because it is so beautiful!"

Who heard it? They did.

The subject of the morning was the Little Fugue in Schumann's Album for the Young. It starts in A - not a simple key on the piano: too many sharps and so off-balance! Suddenly its primary stabilizing tone, E, turns to an E# and we are in dangerous territory where nothing is reliable.

This prompted speculation on the term "fugue" which, according to the dictionary, means chase. Who is chasing what? I had the sensation, listening today, that here Schumann is teasing the player into all kinds of embarrassing tonal and instrumental situations.

Nothing theoretical about it.

As I walked to the subway this morning I was singing to myself a familiar passage from a piano sonata that I have played many, many times. Suddenly I heard it in a new way: instead of four notes repeating I heard six notes with the final two preparing the next idea.

The need to vary experience, not to repeat myself or to parrot back someone else's version of whatever it is--all these things I recall vividly from my earliest memories of learning. Repetition became entrapment within helpless boredom.

All children--even those with severe developmental challenges--respond to variation in music. We work together at keeping the elements in motion; the alternative makes minds and bodies go numb.

Walking down the subway stairs I almost said aloud: "This means so much to me!"

A young friend of mine once had a temp job which paid $7 an hour. While at this job he spotted and solved a systems problem that was costing his employer, a major international bank, millions of dollars. I remember telling him: "People don't solve problems like that for $7 an hour."

Among other musical occupations, I have been teaching children for many years, determined to find a way to teach so that their music is integrated with all of their intellectual and emotional maturation. It is by far the hardest thing I do. Though the problems I address do not have gigantic dollar price tags, they are far more serious in that they involve the deepest experiences of totally alive young people, no two of whom are alike.

Yet giving piano lessons to children is an activity our cultural milieu esteems as comparable to a temp job. Why? Perhaps because many adults associate their own piano lessons with such disappointment, frustration, sometimes even with such pain that they cannot imagine their child having a positive experience.

To be continued.