Adult amateurs provide a privileged window into the experience of young learners, since many of them quit studying early in life -- usually during adolescence -- and resume later out of a feeling of having missed some important element of life. At whatever level of accomplishment--sufficient to play Beethoven, Brahms, or even Rachmaninoff--the aspect of music that most eludes them is rhythm. Trained to think of themselves as inaccurate they self-impose a metronomic standard.

This has two unproductive consequences. For the solo player it obscures response to particular sounds, usually intervals or triads. In chamber music it makes communication with another player extremely difficult so that playing frequently becomes a competition as to who is right.

Hanging on to a rigid beat as if one's life depended on it is defensive. The opposite, which had better not be offensive, is open-minded. Mime master Etienne Marceau used to demonstrate the difference by showing the back of his hand as opposed to extending the hand palm first.

I am struck by how fragile music study is. As soon as a child starts lessons their musicality is exposed, as is parental anxiety. Peer pressure and sibling rivalry contribute their share to a complex picture, making the undertaking ever more complex and difficult to assess.

Teachers are very aware of these forces at work on the child's sense of what it is all about. Being human they, too, are subject to insecurities.

No wonder iron-clad methods remain so attractive.

Getting ready to play some of the Mozart Theme and Variations in G, piano four hands, for assembled families, the young players were asked to consider the purpose of playing for others. I was fascinated to hear one of them talk about entering into Mozart's game of constant trickery with this on-the-surface-of-it simple material.

Their purpose in playing is to show that they are up to the challenge: that Mozart cannot intimidate them (their words, not mine).

And so they dig ever more deeply into the mysteries that make artists want to get up and practice every day.

Having tasted this level of intention wrong notes will not be enough to derail them--and there will be wrong notes, as we all three know.

One young adult student described his senior project for graduation from the School for Visual Art: an animation lasting two minutes or less.

Animation and music have always been closely allied as art forms. In case you have any doubt, Bugs Bunny was cited as a reference at the Musical Ear conference I just attended.

Two minutes represents a lot of music. Just looking at the first beat of a Beethoven slow movement we could not imagine how many animation frames it would take to depict the acoustical activity. That would represent only one aspect of what is happening, another being the internal activity of the player.

A musician experiences countless nanoseconds of decision making during every tone. Try to hear them on a recording. You can't--even I can't. But try to play as if they are not real. You will be bored and so will your audience. Maybe it is electricity. Whatever it is, it is admirably suited to animation.

The musical ear is no more easy to describe than any other artistic inclination. Rhythm seems to be the basis for assessing and accessing the ear as traditional pedagogy approaches the subject. I find tone to be more powerful than rhythm.

In fact, rhythm as taught in the early stages usually corresponds to a level of gross-motor coordination that all children need and most children respond to joyously. I use it that way in my own teaching.


But for many gifted students tone awareness jams rhythm--knocks it clean out of the range of control. Vibrations take over and the mind is addled. Nightmares may ensue, as they did in my case at age ten.

These are two completely different aspects of musical awareness. Each affects motor response in powerful ways. Getting the two to coexist without over-simplification is quite a trick.

It takes a long time--too long, according to some pedagogues.

To this I reply, "What's the rush?"

As a piano teacher dedicated to the proposition that music is at once universal and highly individual I am increasingly interested in the students that are considered unteachable and therefore rejected by music departments and institutions.

Some of these students are characterized as having learning disorders. I wonder to what degree that characterization reflects the inability or unwillingness of the adults in charge to connect to the individual in terms that are mutually understood.

This is my goal as a teacher. I achieve it via cultivation of the musical ear. The ear is the basis of everything, including reading music.

In today's New York Times the following sentences leaped out at me in a review of "The Middle," a TV sit-com about family life. Writing about the youngest child, Brick: "His teacher describes him as 'clinically quirky' and wants him tested. 'I just hope that he's weird enough that our insurance covers it,' [his father] says."

Why not give such a child some good highly individualized piano lessons? Does this pinpoint yet another way in which the high cost of medical insurance is affecting our culture?

Two things struck me most keenly at the Musical Ear Conference. Most important was the concern of so many presenters about the real problems their students have with ear training and their ingenuity in finding ways to make the subject less daunting. The second is my question: Is it essential to so train the ear out of musical activity that by the time students get to college they are paralyzed at having to open their mouths and sing or otherwise identify what they hear?

Oddly, ear responses are faster than any other to which the mind has access. Yet the ear is the slowest thought system to develop, in part because progress in hearing defies measurement by objective standards. I suspect that because it is an area of deep subjectivity it is attractive and meaningful to so many young people (of all ages).