Whether the subject is piano playing or new music our media-crazed culture seems to be favoring the mechanical, the standardized. Even in education that last word comes up with alarming frequency. Where is the great thrust of individual drive on which this country was built and which represents our culture, including our political system, at its most meaningful?

In my sense of things as a parent and educator much of that new drive is going to come not from frenzied competition to win prizes but from paying attention to the greater world we inhabit: the planet, our mutual habitat, and one another, including people with disabilities.

In the old days--the really old days, say 150 years ago--there was a real piano-teaching industry. This has been wonderfully described in the very readable Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History by Arthur Loesser. In the mid-1950's, when the book was written, people seemed to be losing interest in the piano and Loesser forecasts its demise.

We are clearly in a new era of piano fascination. But I fear that in our time people are relishing the technological aspects of the instrument rather than its magical sound. Modern recording and playback techniques have helped legitimatize the surface of the sound. Students are encouraged to play without pedal until they are "ready" and then to keep the unique resonance of the instrument under strict control. People are afraid to make a mess. But I am convinced that it was this very "mess" that has fascinated listeners since the day of the instrument's invention and that continues to inspire composition -- and, incidentally, to defy electronic synthesis.

I teach piano conceptually: it's as simple as that. This means I assume that all hands are different, that people grow and learn in different ways, that there is no method that works. Everyone has to be dealt with as an entire human being. I assume the power of music to organize physically, mentally and emotionally.

There is a place in my studio for the conservatory graduate whose deep instinctual musicality was nearly, but not completely, stifled by years of technique, technique and more technique; as well as for the developmentally challenged young man who learns in his own idiosyncratic fashion.

I listen to each one. Each is free to work at their own pace, to allow the profound synthesis that is music to penetrate their entire being, motivating work that exudes mastery, whether or not one practices hours and hours.

The mastery comes from awareness of detail, not as a matter of polish after "nailing" the notes, but as integral to the piece's power at every stage.

So much going on at once in a four-hand piece by Mozart! Each hand of each player is like a character in an opera.

One may be a king in full regalia, not supposed to let on that he is human despite moments when he is desperately torn between his feelings and proper decorum.

One is our hero, ready to take on all comers, but primarily in search of his beloved, who is concealed in there somewhere.

Then, of course, the beloved herself, perhaps the princess, under her own strictures regarding acceptable behavior, secretly dying to abandon home and princess-hood.

Ah yes, the wicked spirit hovering over all, casting spells, wreaking havoc.

Every note that each character plays is fraught with pushes and pulls like arguments with one's siblings. It is as if the note says "I want to go up!" while the sibling insists "You have to stay where you are!" Out of each minuscule fleeting conflict arises the power, the magic of the piece--time after time, in fact, perhaps even more so with every new hearing.

Many years ago Howard Gardner described our "multiple intelligences." I found his work deeply affirmative of the choice I had made early in my adult life to give precedence to my auditory mind. Formal education, it seemed to me, was organized primarily by visual and verbal experience. These were not the areas that mattered most to me. I made the choice to go with the ear--my own and that of others.

Now, many years later, I find that the formality of education begins already in pre-school with its over-emphasis on multiple choices (that is, tests) based on visual and verbal experience. In the meantime I have staked my entire life and career on the proposition that the auditory intelligence is one that binds people to one another in many powerful ways, not at all comparable to the visual or the verbal. This is not to put down the latter two; just to maintain that they are different.

How odd to realize that what I have felt all along to be most central to life is now considered "far out."

It strikes me as deeply ironic that we trust psychologists and psychiatrists to listen to us empathetically while we look to piano teachers to "rip us to shreds," as one adult put it.

Does empathetic listening require an advanced degree and a framed diploma?

What does empathetic listening have to do with music, anyway?

It's simple: In order for one's playing to sound and feel authentic--i.e., to sound and feel as if we really mean it--we have to trust our own ear. In order for that to happen someone has to affirm first, that we do hear; second, that what we hear makes sense in its own terms. It doesn't need to make someone else's sense.

Here's where the advanced degree, unfortunately, comes in. After years trying desperately to replicate their own teacher's playing, many piano teachers have lost touch with their own native musical sense. After years of having to get it "right," whatever that is, how can we be expected to change our expectations of our students?

Most of our students are decades younger than we are. They are not growing up in a world of consonant major triads. Their sound imaginations reflect their soundworld, not ours. Unrestricted improvisation is a great way to start the two-way listening that makes real mutual awareness, the basis of empathetic listening.

Today, contemplating Mozart's only piano sonata in G major with a longtime dedicated amateur student we hit on Mozart's trademark combination of the strong with the weak. Sound the stronger two notes of any triad, then add in an unlikely third note, transforming the expectation of strong into vulnerable. Put a full triad in root position on the downbeat opening a section: it will be strong, no? Well, not if it's in the wrong key and minor instead of the expected major.

Such elements are the stuff of high artistry. They are instinctively felt and reacted to by the musical amateur and by the child who feels free to manifest a reaction. The reaction usually show up in "wrong" notes--errors that reveal the activity of the inner musical sense at work.