Now that everything is equally accessible at the push of a button we risk losing the sense of the difference between the intimate musical gesture and the public musical event. Some genres are made for household enjoyment while others are clearly intended for public spectacle or mass participation.

Some of the most intimate music was written for duets, particularly piano four-hands. This was meant to be played after a good dinner, with and for friends, probably after a glass or three of good wine and other spirits. A fair amount of this music is downright inebriated. (Schubert's Notre Amitie est Invariable is certainly in that category--even the title is over the top.)

Children taking piano lessons are rarely let into the secret. It makes all the difference in the world, as the emotions accompanying wrong notes are critical in making the distinction between public and private. If public, a wrong note is embarrassing at least. If private, the same wrong note may be endearing.

Perhaps this is why so many pianists really hate to play four-hand music.

I note with some amusement how different it is to train young people to be discerning amateurs than to be pretend professionals. Perfectionism is a dead-end street when it comes to music; pretend perfectionism is even deader. All too often pretense to perfection is the disease of professionalism.

A discerning amateurs is like the five-year-old who, when listening to Don Quixote read to him, burst out laughing at the second instance of Sancho Panza uttering his inimitable words of wisdom: "I know what he's going to say!" and then proceeded to get it.

Imagine someone putting a period at the end of every line in an Emily Dickinson poem.

Today someone brought in an edition of Brahms works for piano in which Emil Sauer had done the equivalent, adding slurs that entirely change the texture and implications of the piece.

It reminded me that as a teenager I was given that edition. I decided that Brhams was an inferior composer. One look at the Authentic edition (very inexpensive, published by Kalmus) in which there are almost no markings, assured me that the opposite is true.

Try fooling around with the punctuation in a poem you know and love, then compare the Sauer edition of Brahms to the Authentic and see for yourself.

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!"