Thinking about sonatas: Most of us learn them as if the goal is to play them through from start to finish. Once that is drilled into our fingers it is like pulling teeth to attach the notion of a sonata to meaning.

A sonata is a collection of pieces: a dance, a song, and a puzzle piece or two, usually a sonata form or a rondo. The sonata form, usually the opening movement, is not a narrative. Rarely does it begin with a clear statement either of the key or the meter. The clarity is hidden somewhere within the movement.

Perhaps that explains the necessity of repeating the first section: Since the beginning does not make full sense when played first off it has to come around again a second time in the context of other material before we get a feeling of knowing where we are.

I always thought that the saddest thing would be to have a child who didn't want something so badly that they would do anything to get or achieve it. But I remember how secret my own wanting was: I could never have voiced it -- perhaps I should say I would never have voiced it for by the time I reached adulthood I had experienced disappointment so many times that I knew I had better keep it a secret.

Now that I have achieved what I most deeply wanted--which is, to play a page of Mozart to my own satisfaction--I feel that my job as a teacher is to help young people give voice to their reactions as they learn, as they play music.

One of my young students wanted so badly to play a piece her friend played. But mastery of the piece turned out to be a dead-end street: she couldn't build a house on envy.

There is no doubt that intense involvement with tone evokes deep emotion. In a concert hall a single performer immersed in the simplest line can move hundreds of people to tears. Is it any wonder that a child's intense involvement with tone evokes emotion among family members?

The difference is that the emotion in the family context probably takes the form of greatly magnified familial tension that underlies every manifestation of individuality on the part of a single child, or parent for that matter.

When so much music training has emphasized pleasing the ear of others people often find it heretical to imagine music as something done for one's own pleasure.

Thinking about everyone having access to intense responses to tone: I find that for many people music instruction actually dims those responses. (You know the expression about a little learning being dangerous.)

It is possible to get back in touch with those deep experiences--in fact, helping people achieve that constitutes a large part of my work. It could even be said that it is the story of my own musical life.

In the work I do with children my goal is to not disturb their confident access to their innermost musicality. Interestingly, for each child this requires a unique trajectory. That is why they must also learn to play together with one another and why they do so without regimentation but with mutual confidence.

Beats, measures and bar lines all look so innocent. All you need to do is figure out the arithmetic and then count, count, count!

It works until you start to react to actual sounds.

The other evening I heard Marc Ponthus play Schumann's Kreisleriana with breathtaking intensity: at times faster than fast (as specified by the composer), at times surpassing slow (also specified). It was a beautiful lesson in the fantasy life of tone.

Even children and people with limited physical capability have access to that level of insight, power, and satisfaction.

It's not just sounds that can cause dismay: how about quarter notes? This morning the uncomfortable quarter note appeared in the early E-flat Sonata of Mozart: An innocent tonic chord in root position perched almost intolerably on the second beat of the bar, dying to move.

We don't usually think of rhythm as dissonant, especially in music of the Classical period. But there it is, impudent as all get-out, the teenage Wolfgang writing something his father surely did not approve of--as my student put it: "Like rock and roll."

Pleasing your own ear has its beginnings in acknowledging that you like some sounds better than others. As soon as you realize that you don't like a sound--for whatever reason, or for no apparent reason at all--you are on the way to a dramatic "plot line" for a piece. Getting from a sound we do like to a sound we don't like and doing so on purpose is quite like telling a story.