How is a Classical piano sonata like a computer game? you might well ask. Let's say you have a harpsichord. It has black keys and white keys and they produce similar tone color. Now suddenly here's a keyboard on which the white and black keys produce entirely distinct tone colors. Wouldn't you be tempted to explore set-ups in which this dichotomy would prove amusing? or threatening? or _____ (fill in the blank)? The possibilities are endless.

Let's take an actual scenario: Two white keys, a descending minor third. Wait a minute: don't we orient to intervals rising rather than falling? Where are these tones headed: down another third--in which case will it be major or minor, white key or black key? Or down a fourth, white or black key?

Let's say the composer gives us a major third onto a white key. Aha! It's major. But he slides off in a slightly complicated manner slurring over the barline onto the fourth, a black key. Uhoh.

We thought we knew where we were. But that pesky black key presents a dilemma--auditory, not visual. For the eye can see that the accompanying Alberti bass figure places the black key within the dominant harmony. Even so it sticks out, doesn't it? whether we want it to or not. Herein is the enticement to pursue the matter--the plot, if you will, through three movements. It will occupy you for at least 15 minutes--perhaps even a lifetime. (Mozart K. 283)

One of my longtime students is heavily into computers and into composition at the piano. I have long maintained that the piano imploded upon the auditory mind the way the computer has imploded upon the visual mind. This young man convinces me that I am right. He is unusual in that he is active in both areas. We are engaged in a wonderful exercise: imagining the opening of a Beethoven slow movement as a computer animation.

I go so far as to say that the sonatas of Beethoven and Mozart (just to name obvious examples among many others) are piano games similar to computer games in that they are really cognition teasers. From them you can learn how your auditory brain works and you can expand its capacity almost without limit.

As far as I know no one else describes this oeuvre this way. I think it is because most musicians know the works by sight or via theoretical explanation rather than ear-first.

Incidentally, Ross Lee Finney has a charming volume for beginners called 32 Piano Games. Nice.

There is a controversy raging via e-mail about the major/minor : happy/sad connection: whether it applies to all music, what notable exceptions people can name, and so on. (These are music theorists carrying on, in case you wonder who would care enough about this to engage in ongoing debate.)

I found it reassuring when someone voiced impatience, saying that surely the topic merited more refined treatment than eithers and ors. I think immediately of Mozart's Piano Sonata in G which trembles between major and minor from its very first two pickup notes. When Mozart writes in a major key it is never just in major, though sometimes the deviations are only barely discernible. Such elements enliven his line. No theory can adequately explain or even find them. In fact, theory often gets in the way by accounting for wholes when it is details that hold us enthralled.

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.