"I don't think I hear overtones."

You undoubtedly do hear overtones; it's just that no one ever drew your attention to them so you thought you could play without noticing them.

I have theories about what happens to piano playing as a result:
Many pianists pay no attention to bass parts or to sustained notes.
Some pianists hum aloud to mask those uncontrollable vibrations.
Some experience utter terror when playing a new instrument on which the overtone blend is completely different.

Imagining the piano without overtones is like pretending that lightning has nothing to do with thunder. While it is true that lightning and thunder can be frightening, they are also fascinating. I haven't yet had a child student who was not mesmerized by overtones.

After hearing an extraordinary performance of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde I have been thinking about one of my favorite topics: drunkenness in music.

What does drunkenness have to do with the piano? To which I can only reply: "Precisely." Though the piano has come to be associated with what one adult called "obedience mode" it was not always thus. Why should any musical instrument from any culture be always and only about good behavior and doing things by the book?

Just yesterday one of my young students caught on to the playful aspects of control over loud and less loud, short and not-so-short in a John Field Theme and Variations. She was beaming with delight at the discovery of her potential to make magic with a piece on which she has been working for months. It's not quite drunk yet but definitely headed in the "right" direction.

Today I draw your attention to those remarkable parents who do not get in the way of their children's joy.

It is easy when listening to one's child perform to imagine what other people are thinking, rather than just listen to what the child is doing.

When the child feels free to share their joy that is exactly what they will do--even though the playing may contain slips and flaws. It is a special category that I have created: "Better than perfect."

Haven't you heard it: "That kid is so gifted: he doesn't need a teacher!"

Gifted kids are easily exploited in situations where their gift is held up as an example to others. But even the most gifted child is a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. What the gifted kid needs is a teacher who is not afraid to spot what the kid needs and to make it possible for him or her to work on it in an environment where everyone is learning on a comparable level but entirely at their own pace.

Such learning inevitably involves some pain: Gifted kids are used to bluffing so that no one will notice their weakness. In the case of one child I taught, his strength was a photographic memory; his weakness the inability to connect his vision to his ear. Working on this was not pleasant for a kid who had never been required to make that kind of essential brain reorganization.

In my 20's I had a teacher who made me correct a similar disconnect. It was some of the hardest work I ever had to do.

Today a musician who follows this blog told me she likes the metaphysical entries the best. Hmmm.

I had already been thinking about how essential it is to have dissonance in one's musical life. A steady diet of consonance just won't do, just as it won't do to retain the taste of a four-year-old in any other respect.

One person I teach was not granted the possibility of a fully developed brain as most of us experience it, nor does he have sight. I have insisted, gently but persistently, that he learn Bartok from the volumes "For Children." Though he still resists at times, most of the dissonances are there in all their melancholy, even grief. Surely he experiences these emotions somewhere in his being--he is, after all, human--though music is the only means he has to express them.

Everyone who hears him play is moved.

Every time I hear him play I am moved. And challenged.

Ah! The quarter note!

Having learned slavishly to count quarter-note beats most people schooled in classical music lose all sense of rhythmic wit, though I argue that Classical composers go to great lengths to give us hilarious quarter notes.

Plant in your head a musical idea that trips along in eighth notes. Now do it at half speed. Feel the tension? Try the opposite: start with an idea in quarters and transform it by going quick-march/double time. Feel the excitement?

Isn't this why you could never successfully count beats in Mozart's Sonata in C typically given to "beginners?" (I couldn't for many years and I notice that others can't either.)

More than once I have observed experienced professionals rendered rhythmically helpless by a single 4/4 bar in which, after many measures of complex multi-layered rhythms, Haydn requires all four members of the quartet to play quarter notes together. Rhythm is motion; motion is always fluid; without inner tension it quickly becomes what one of my adult students rightly calls "plodding."

No wonder people quit, or go downtown where rhythm swings.

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.