You might wonder why I care so much about dumbing down and regimentation. If you live with a young child you learn what intensity is. Nobody smells with greater acuity than a young child: walking in the door they can tell whether there are onions in the soup. The same acuity applies to sight and to hearing.

Methods based on dumbing down and regimentation so infuriated me as a child that I told my mother it was a waste of money to continue lessons with the offending teacher. Not every child has the advantage of being taken seriously. Not every child is aware of an alternative.

The great pianist Busoni said that technical exercises should be doled out as carefully as toxic medicines. Every hand is a unique organ of action and response. They may all have the same number of fingers but there the resemblance definitely stops. I devote a lot of energy to taking each child seriously, which means I assume that each needs to possess his or her own hands to express a musical self waiting to be discovered and developed. Just because pianos share certain attributes does not mean they should be taught as instruments of regimentation.

My neighbor's child has begun taking piano lessons. I hear the evidence when I wait for the elevator, evidence of regimented time doing regimented things--making sounds that are the equivalent of stick figures. OK, stick figures have their place.

But the ear is too fragile, too personal, too precious to be dumbed down.

Espousing this approach feels sometimes like taking on an entire culture. I'm game.

I am fascinated by listening. Yesterday I ran into a former student on the street. We talked animatedly about listening and how out of style it is. It causes her a great deal of anguish as she cares a lot about how music actually sounds. (She is a cellist so she is intimately involved with sounds.)

As sound has haunted me since childhood I view it as an activity that has an inward as well as outward aspect. It is a pity that so much music instruction directs the ear only outward. It is also a pity that so much of that direction is pre-determined by visual cues.

The notation is not the sound.

Yesterday I held the first of my Acoustical Kaleidoscope sessions in New York City. It proved a fascinating enterprise as the audience participated in many ways: volunteering for improvisation exercises, commenting, questioning. There could be little doubt but that the piano's sound is incredibly complex, and that the way one listens to it (or does not listen to it) directly affects one's touch.

The more I play the deeper I find the connection between the sensation at the tips of my fingers and my awareness of the minutest vibrations. I don't want to disturb them.

Reading music is not a simple skill by any means. Reading notation should ideally be taught entirely differently to singers than to instrumentalists. When instruments are concerned alternative notations should be introduced, like fingering charts and tabulatures so that the mechanical interface between sound and physical response is objectified.

Since the invention of the piano these distinctions have pretty much disappeared. People who play every instrument expect to read as if in terms of a keyboard. Why doesn't that work?

I am not a scientist, but rather an observant artist/teacher. I see that the ear works fast, very fast; and that the body responds slowly, very slowly. When the notation of sound is confused with physical instructions the perception of sound is slowed.

When children are taught to listen first their physical responses are dictated by what they hear. They don't produce sound, they respond to it. It takes longer to achieve this but the result is mastery, apparent already to the young learner. The love that accompanies this kind of learning is lifelong.

Good sight-reading involves comprehension, not just the ability to play right notes. I have trained serious conservatory-bound high school students to sight-read efficiently by ignoring the notes and concentrating on articulation and dynamics. The result is comprehension. In the case of my two young students sight-reading Schumann at the piano today it involved laughter -- right away! They were intrigued, motivated to go over the piece to get the notes right but for the right reason. They had a wonderful time. They got it.

The high school students who went on to take conservatory entrance sight-reading tests reported that the tester was sure they already knew the test material.

A colleague asked me what would be the right instrument on which to start a six-year-old. My first (unspoken) reaction: Six is already late.

A revealing conversation ensued in which it became clear that we were talking about music defined two completely different ways--again, like the windows seen from the outside, or the inside.

I told her of my young son who began by drumming under the piano as I practiced. She was horrified at the prospect of the disturbing sound of the drum and insisted that he was a "special child." I assured her that he was always together with me; he never disturbed a thing. And he has always had impeccable phrasing and timing.

Her definition is music as something one does. For me music is something one hears. Invited into an act of shared hearing every child unless neurologically damaged will want to participate, not disturb. Inviting in starts the day the baby is born.