Is there a place in our culture for secrets? Now that everyone knows everything about everyone else what will happen to meaning? Can children tell the difference between something that has meaning to them and something that does not?

I will never forget the wisdom of a ten-year-old when asked "When do you play loud?"

"When it's important."

"And when do you play soft?"

After some thought, "When it's important."

I suspect that some children do not play the piano at home because they need music to support their secret life.

This morning's New York Times has an obituary article on Dr. Stanley Greenspan who developed a way to deal with atypical young learners: get down on the floor and reach them at the level of their eyes. The technique is called " doing floor time." It is very like what I do with my young students. I get my ear to be in sync with what they are hearing rather than pretend that they have any way of hearing as I hear. Once this fundamental musical contact has been established they learn with remarkable finesse.

It takes a while to establish this contact as most of their school learning is based on the opposite dynamic in which the teacher essentially demands "Do as I do; see as I see." Self-confidence grows from the child knowing that their field of perception is reliable and that it is communicable. Someone is paying attention and willing to engage them in an exchange at a level that is real to them.

Doesn't it seem obvious when you think about it?

I use a similar technique teaching adults to sing in tune. First get your face to reflect your intention to sing a certain vowel and indicate to everyone with whom you are singing that you share this intention with them. Chances are that when you all actually produce the tone it will be in tune. Surprisingly it works with adults just as it does with newborns.

Sometimes I get the feeling that we are not prepared to believe that children are as likely to have something to say in tone as they are in words. Words and other pre-codified objects demand less of the listener than do sounds in their larger, unrestricted domain. But this larger, unrestricted domain clearly exists.

It is to this realm that Szymanowski's music refers--and Janacek's. Also Bartok, Schumann, Chopin...the list goes on.

By overly restricting our notions of what music refers to we have made it harder to receive uncodified messages except, perhaps, through the medium of instrumental virtuosity. By the time most young pianists have leaped through those hoops of pretend-fire all that usually remains is code without access to content, which then has to be pasted on.

I have been moved to notice the depth of the music native to my young students.

Last night I went again to hear Anderszewski in a second concert designed to get people to listen to the extraordinary music of Szymanowski. Again, a superb evening. This time this strange music was linked to Schumann's Fairytale Pictures for Viola and Piano as well as to Bartok.

The technical difficulties evaporate in the hands of such an imaginative player. We were all drunk, wistful, mourning and childlike together.

The piano is not one but a thousand instruments. Its sound lives on many levels and is responsive to such a myriad to touches and balances. Last night the master of them all played at Zankel Hall: Piotr Anderszewski in a program of Szymanowski and Janacek--not the usual fare. His playing is kaleidoscopic. When have I heard a pianist better match a violin's harmonics?

To hear such a virtuoso play pianissimo, barely breathing on the piano, is rare, very rare.

Last night's listening was of a totally different kind: the sizable audience seemed to be in on the code--a modernist code exemplified in three pieces written during the past year by serious composers. It is a tuneless and mostly toneless kind of modernism related only in one work to a process that I recognize, in that case, dance.

Oddly, I thought, the concert ended with Stravinsky's Les Noces, written in the 1920's, programmed I suppose as the prototype for modernism. But there we had decidedly human interactions in the voices, in the solo roles, in the percussion accompaniment. That made it sound and feel very traditional, indeed.

The other day I stood among some people listening intently as a young woman pronounced her name on the piano in what I can only describe as an awesome display of precise listening on everyone's part.

Maybe what gets in the way when we hear interpretations of written works is our need to pass judgment rather than to trust our own responses. Passing judgment involves imposing a measure of conformity to the experience, if you think about it.

I have been told by musicians in the jazz world that New York audiences are less spontaneous than audiences elsewhere in this country. The worry about not being "in" seems to keep us New Yorkers from having a good time.