Working on the Rachmaninoff Waltz from Opus 11 with two fully aware, intelligent young people has been a real eye-opener for me. Until working with these two, I always approached four-hand music from the standpoint of getting it right at all costs. Here, however, is a piece that is crafted with wrong notes that exude inebriation. It literally reels, gets blurred vision, misses the correct note again and again. The fine ears of these young people make it clear to me that this ultra sophisticated aspect of the piece is very subtly composed into it. Ironically, it is an aspect of music that cannot really be written down--it simply must be heard. How do I know that they hear it? Because they trip over its illogical passages. Listening to their errors has revealed the piece to me.

My respect for Rachmaninoff has grown enormously. So has my respect for these students and for the uniquely difficult challenge of reading aspects of music that defy notation.

Formulas are OK as far as they go, but in music they often go nowhere. Take, for example, time signatures. These are not formulas, contrary to what you were told when you were ten or eleven. Every time signature needs to be interpreted in conjunction with a tempo marking, prevailing note values, and other small details.

It is amazing how simplistic we learn to be when the opposite is called for in so many cases. As a result the music seems to be leaden, boring.

Just last week I had two examples of time signatures that were entirely the opposite of what I used to think they were. Now that I finally know how to read....

It takes a while.

That is the point.

There is a lot of drunkenness in classical music--more than most piano teachers would care to think. My teenage four-hand students are working on the Rachmaninoff Waltz, from Opus 11. Its scenario is intoxication of two kinds: rhythmic and alcoholic. Playing and listening to it in this light changes drastically how one hears and comprehends what is and isn't happening: wrong notes composed into the piece, accents that do not jibe between the two parts, missing beats and downbeats, slowings down and speedings up, spinning lines that go on and on for indeterminate amounts of time... it has "out of control" written all over it.

Two extraordinary lessons in rhythm yesterday: one a teenager just learning her way around Beethoven. We started with the definition of Allegretto in 3/4. It cannot mean a straightforward quarter note beat because I believe that "-etto" implies an eighth-note pulse. Are there any eighth notes? Sure enough they were all over the place but hidden, as it were, in dotted quarter notes (what is a dotted quarter if not a 3/8 value?.

She sightread the movement as an eighth-note piece rather than the plodding 3/4 piece I have always heard and played myself when her age. The result was a fascinating reading of a piece that otherwise can feel quite pedestrian.

Later came a mature woman, very experienced pianist but not a good sight reader, with a Brahms Intermezzo in 6/8. What do you know about 6/8? Two strong beats to the bar. Really?

It turned out not that simple. Her delight was boundless.

Again, it is a piece I had always heard and played myself (or attempted to play) in a conventional 6/8 meter.

The point is that "'taint simple, McGee!"

Overtones. That's what happened when the piano was invented. Overtones became the subject of the music and the content of the sound, not discrete notes or harmonies. That's why there are so many broken "chords" in the left hand: the harmonic context shifts gradually as overtones compound upon already sounding mixes of sound. That's why the "bass" notes in a broken chord are not to be sustained and why they do not indicate full change of pedal: they are specifically crafted to carry over and blend with an already sounding constellation of vibrations. Visual analysis often obscures this essential auditory observation.

In much piano music one cannot--must not--separate functions in the Baroque manner of bass, melody and chord. Doesn't work.

Details, details. As important as it is to get the general idea of a piece of music it is the details that stick in one's craw. They certainly bothered me as a youngster, particularly those pesky chromatic alterations Mozart inserted in all the wrong places. I disliked them to the point of "correcting" them. No one stopped me, so what difference could it possibly make?

I notice when a student trips over details because it shows that the student is reacting to their specificity. This often means that I have to make the effort to go into the probable cause for these improbable musical events. I have benefited greatly from this effort and so has Rachmaninoff, the composer du jour.

Today I remember the remark of a young girl who had played a wrong note: "But the note didn't want to go up!" Labelled by everyone but me a poor reader she did not last long in my tutelage: her parents were determined that she remain a poor reader. I feel that she was really ahead of the game in that she showed comprehension. If that isn't the point of reading, what is?

I recall also moments in which I heard distinctly certain tonal events that surprised me by making it impossible for me simply to play the notes in front of me. When I have gone back to find the passages they have vanished. It is as though I read theoretically and listen acoustically and the two simply do not line up.