My neighbor's child has begun taking piano lessons. I hear the evidence when I wait for the elevator, evidence of regimented time doing regimented things--making sounds that are the equivalent of stick figures. OK, stick figures have their place.

But the ear is too fragile, too personal, too precious to be dumbed down.

Espousing this approach feels sometimes like taking on an entire culture. I'm game.

I am fascinated by listening. Yesterday I ran into a former student on the street. We talked animatedly about listening and how out of style it is. It causes her a great deal of anguish as she cares a lot about how music actually sounds. (She is a cellist so she is intimately involved with sounds.)

As sound has haunted me since childhood I view it as an activity that has an inward as well as outward aspect. It is a pity that so much music instruction directs the ear only outward. It is also a pity that so much of that direction is pre-determined by visual cues.

The notation is not the sound.

Yesterday I held the first of my Acoustical Kaleidoscope sessions in New York City. It proved a fascinating enterprise as the audience participated in many ways: volunteering for improvisation exercises, commenting, questioning. There could be little doubt but that the piano's sound is incredibly complex, and that the way one listens to it (or does not listen to it) directly affects one's touch.

The more I play the deeper I find the connection between the sensation at the tips of my fingers and my awareness of the minutest vibrations. I don't want to disturb them.

Reading music is not a simple skill by any means. Reading notation should ideally be taught entirely differently to singers than to instrumentalists. When instruments are concerned alternative notations should be introduced, like fingering charts and tabulatures so that the mechanical interface between sound and physical response is objectified.

Since the invention of the piano these distinctions have pretty much disappeared. People who play every instrument expect to read as if in terms of a keyboard. Why doesn't that work?

I am not a scientist, but rather an observant artist/teacher. I see that the ear works fast, very fast; and that the body responds slowly, very slowly. When the notation of sound is confused with physical instructions the perception of sound is slowed.

When children are taught to listen first their physical responses are dictated by what they hear. They don't produce sound, they respond to it. It takes longer to achieve this but the result is mastery, apparent already to the young learner. The love that accompanies this kind of learning is lifelong.

Good sight-reading involves comprehension, not just the ability to play right notes. I have trained serious conservatory-bound high school students to sight-read efficiently by ignoring the notes and concentrating on articulation and dynamics. The result is comprehension. In the case of my two young students sight-reading Schumann at the piano today it involved laughter -- right away! They were intrigued, motivated to go over the piece to get the notes right but for the right reason. They had a wonderful time. They got it.

The high school students who went on to take conservatory entrance sight-reading tests reported that the tester was sure they already knew the test material.

A colleague asked me what would be the right instrument on which to start a six-year-old. My first (unspoken) reaction: Six is already late.

A revealing conversation ensued in which it became clear that we were talking about music defined two completely different ways--again, like the windows seen from the outside, or the inside.

I told her of my young son who began by drumming under the piano as I practiced. She was horrified at the prospect of the disturbing sound of the drum and insisted that he was a "special child." I assured her that he was always together with me; he never disturbed a thing. And he has always had impeccable phrasing and timing.

Her definition is music as something one does. For me music is something one hears. Invited into an act of shared hearing every child unless neurologically damaged will want to participate, not disturb. Inviting in starts the day the baby is born.

The difference between white key and black key sonority on the piano is striking to a child. It is perhaps one of the reasons why children balk at reading music in the flat keys. I decided to test that proposition the other day by having a child read and react to, one sound at a time, a Haydn minuet in E-flat.

Her responses to the specific voicing of intervals, position of black in relation to white keys, registral placement on the piano -- all revealed extremely vivid ear-pure response.

I asked her if the sounds bothered her when she heard me play. "No," she replied, "because you know what is coming next."

Incidentally, the strategy was to begin not at the beginning but at a cadence. Reading "backward" from the cadence -- i.e., approaching it from increasing distances -- clarified a context in which all kinds of dissonance became meaningful. She ended up playing the whole thing at first sitting, by her choice, though it was not at all a simple piece.

I take this as a clear demonstration of why I do not teach major keys as if they are interchangeable: they are not!