I have been thinking all day about how different music seems when the point is to get it, rather than to get all the notes right but miss the point entirely.

Too often the meaning has to be supplied by theoretical analysis then pasted onto the music via some intellectual process that has very little to do with actual listening.

There is no doubt: sound comes first. The young duo sightread Rachmaninoff's Barcarolle this morning. Immediately it sounded wonderful, even when there were rhythmic meanderings between them. They were listening, that was the secret. Without knowing the piece they already had discerned its scenario, without any help from me.

I could not have done that at their age because my reading was vision-based, not ear-based.

I find that when I listen without a score I hear the music more accurately. When I read the score I pre-judge what I am going to hear and miss the instrumental subtleties that distinguish this particular version of the G triad from all others the world has ever heard.

Read this way a Beethoven sonata comes to life from within--right away.

This kind of learning, which admittedly takes longer, also lasts longer, both in terms of sustained concentration while playing and in terms of integrated fascination with the work.

Think about the difference between a public and a private instrument. Are all pianos public? One would think they were judging from the way children are encouraged to think about them--or rather, are encouraged to treat them. Because from what I observe, the child's thinking about the piano rarely enters into the picture.

The thought part is more closely bound up with the tonal imagination--with sound itself rather than with proper execution or interpretation.

The thought part is harder to define, harder to train, yet more lasting in its impact and more central to the real power of music.

Yesterday I heard an eminent theorist/musicologist present two versions of a Beethoven Sonata for Piano and Cello, Op. 69. It was a fascinating presentation which featured performances of both versions of the piece by a highly competent student duo. I had to leave before the conclusion of the presentation, but heard enough to realize that the scholar, himself a cellist who has played the piece many times, got it backwards: It is an accompanied sonata, but it is the cello that is accompanying the piano, not the other way around. The duo who played definitely had been advised to keep the cello on top, so to speak, and the piano took a receding role. This is entirely wrong as it skirts all the critical issues raised by the composition: why it contrasts A major, a fine cello key, with F# minor, a lousy cello key but a fascinating piano key.

The piano was a knockout invention. Its sound, then as now, is unfathomably rich, particularly in the black key department. Beethoven was totally fascinated with the sound of black keys in contrast to white. How do I know? Look at the key signatures of Op. 2: No. 1-- four flats; No. 2 -- three sharps; No. 3 -- none of either. This pattern repeats throughout his life. Can it be accidental, then, that he regards this as subject matter?

Questions of intonation are among the most difficult to address. It is as if string players, already facing intonation challenges when playing together, cannot imagine that the difficulties they have playing in tune with winds or with the piano might signal details of passionate importance in the composer's mind.

Yesterday I had a remarkable conversation with an eminent bassoonist who told me about specific difficult-to-manage pitches on the bassoon. I was astounded, having played often with bassoon, one of my favorite duo instruments. How differently I would listen knowing what I now know! I should think such information would be critical to an understanding of specific sounds in all music.

Now that everything is equally accessible at the push of a button we risk losing the sense of the difference between the intimate musical gesture and the public musical event. Some genres are made for household enjoyment while others are clearly intended for public spectacle or mass participation.

Some of the most intimate music was written for duets, particularly piano four-hands. This was meant to be played after a good dinner, with and for friends, probably after a glass or three of good wine and other spirits. A fair amount of this music is downright inebriated. (Schubert's Notre Amitie est Invariable is certainly in that category--even the title is over the top.)

Children taking piano lessons are rarely let into the secret. It makes all the difference in the world, as the emotions accompanying wrong notes are critical in making the distinction between public and private. If public, a wrong note is embarrassing at least. If private, the same wrong note may be endearing.

Perhaps this is why so many pianists really hate to play four-hand music.

I note with some amusement how different it is to train young people to be discerning amateurs than to be pretend professionals. Perfectionism is a dead-end street when it comes to music; pretend perfectionism is even deader. All too often pretense to perfection is the disease of professionalism.

A discerning amateurs is like the five-year-old who, when listening to Don Quixote read to him, burst out laughing at the second instance of Sancho Panza uttering his inimitable words of wisdom: "I know what he's going to say!" and then proceeded to get it.