You might wonder whether touch so sensitive as what I have been describing is accessible only to great artists like Rubinstein.

I could tell when I heard a nine-year-old play that the sound she loved best was the B-major triad. I hear in the touch of another child that the action on her piano at home is much stiffer than mine. Last week an older woman's touch revealed that her piano at home sounded better than it had in months.

Could it be that this intimacy is what we all crave?

Is it possible that Killer Scales drill it out of our ears and fingers?

Touch continues to amaze me. It is so communicative. I can tell by the way a student touches my piano that their piano at home needs tuning. When the at-home instrument is sounding at its best I can hear that, too.

It is a living demonstration of what Rubinstein once reportedly said, to the effect that pianists don't touch the keys; they touch the vibrations they hear in their heads.

Wouldn't you know it! I missed a crucial point in yesterday's post: What really made it fun was that I wasn't the one who heard the A-flat. It was one of the young people.

Conventional thinking definitely has its drawbacks. Trained as I am to hear things according to harmonic formulas I often miss the point. Take what happened here this morning: Two young people playing a duet in E-flat, everything going fine until a chord with a D-natural kept coming out with a D-flat. Wrong note? Conventional thinking says so, but experience leads me to ask: Whose "fault?"

As it happens the composer has weighted the chords leading up to this one with so many A-flats that D-natural--the right note-- sounds wrong.

I call this great composition.

Better yet, it's fun.

Surely you remember the thrill of watching a trapeze artist move as if flying from one swinging bar to another, seemingly suspending both time and gravity.

It's quite like the thrill of moving from one fully sustained whole note to the next. Think of what will happen if you let go too soon.

Sound is the medium within which we move. It supports us as water supports the swimmer. Letting go of it is like pulling the plug on the ocean--not a great idea unless, of course, we have a terrific reason for doing so.

"The note didn't want to go up!" This was the reaction of an eight-year-old to her wrong note on the piano. If you ever needed proof that tone has a life of its own, this is surely it.

Allowing yourself to notice whether or not the note wants to go up (or down) is what involves you, the fully alive and responsive you, in even the simplest composition at the level at which it was conceived. The only thing that can keep you from noticing such forces at play is that you are not really listening.

Maybe you find it hard to really listen because no one ever really listened to you.

What could be funnier than a repeated note?

What's so funny about a repeated note? I already played it. Duh.

Yes, but did you listen to it? Okay, you touched the key two times. But didn't you notice that the sound was different the second time?

Aha! You weren't listening! Something happened inside the case and you missed it. Try again.

Until the piano was invented there would have been no point in repeating notes on a keyboard instrument. Someone should do a Ph.D. dissertation on the subject, though that would be pooh-poohed as equivalent to a doctorate in pixels.

What's wrong with pixels?

Once again, with feeling: What could be funnier than a repeated note?

What absolutely hysterical composition do you think prompted this post?