Music is many different things. The piano is many different instruments. Each depends on context, usage. Each might be said to resemble a mirror, reflecting sometimes distorting, sometimes revealing.

Keeping an open mind about these things has enabled me to take seriously the work of even an extremely developmentally challenged young man, one of my young students. He has access to tonal logic; at times that seems dangerous to me as he risks being locked into a tonal world of only one possibility. Listening to him open his ear to other possibilities has been a revelation for everyone privileged to observe his progress.