Yesterday, determined to get one of my young students to relish the humor of a certain well-known Clementi Sonatina in C, I suggested she play only the quarter notes: leaving out everything else, play only the quarter notes. It was, according to her, like playing a different piece.

In the evening I heard a recent piano work by John Adams, the effect of which was very similar to that of playing only those quarter notes.

Try it with any familiar Classical work. Let me know what happens.

Playing for others is an act of fundamental generosity. It's like telling someone a deep secret, letting them know how much you love the sounds you are playing, or how interesting it is to move from sounds that you love through others that are more puzzling.

If every time you play you are in touch with your response to sound others will feel your involvement and will support it with their rapt attention. Sometimes people come up to me and recall specific pieces that they heard me play thirty years ago.

Whose ear do you aim to please?

I invite you to think about a word that doesn't exist in English--or if it does, to please let me know it.

We use the word "vision" to denote sight and also referring to a goal for some important piece of work. Is there a word for ear-vision?

Do you agree with me that there is a music inside of us as well as a music outside? I think of music study as the process of getting the two to match.

More on the subject of speed: ear speed. We expect blind children to hear more acutely than sighted children. I suspect this is only because we dumb down sighted hearing by simplifying the notion of what is heard so that we can connect it to visual symbols and to motor responses that leave out the fascinating parts of sound, the invisible parts, the overtones.

Yesterday I witnessed a vivid demonstration of this. A young student, blind since birth, is obviously stimulated by overtones, which he hears and responds to powerfully. His sister is composing a piece of her own. With no knowledge of theory (I don't impose such "right/wrong" perceptions on my students) she fools around, finding sonorities I would never dream of, touching them as if they are alive--which, in her hands and in her ear, they are. The result is entirely unconventional, entirely original, entirely compelling.

Does her piece need to be like everyone else's? like anyone else's?

The ear is many times faster than any other perception system--in fact, hundreds of times faster. I think of musicians as people who aspire to that almost immeasurable rate of speed. Musical children experience music at that speed. Everything in my experience supports this observation.

My question: Why is so much time spent slowing their ear responses down to the level at which they can control their motor function? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the motor function be left free to respond at the -- here we go! -- speed of sound?

This observation applies mostly to learning at the piano. It's completely different with stringed instruments which come in child sizes, and where the feedback in sound is directly connected to motor skills--a whole different ball of wax.

In between hearing music the way a child hears it (which adults can only dimly imagine) and reading it the way standard notation presents it (which any sensible musician will tell you doesn't make much musical sense) there is a huge gap.

Which is more important: to be able to read music or to be able to make music?

Don't misunderstand me: I value reading music enormously. But I respect the distance between these two very different skills -- so much so that I will work with anyone who has trouble reading for whatever reason. As a result I keep learning more and more about the life of sound itself, without an interface of notation or of theory or of any other system of indirect reference.

Last night I attended a session on Surrealist poets Paul Eluard and Rene Char at the Philoctetes Center. (The session will be viewable on-line in about three days--I recommend it.) I was struck by how the most ordinary words were so charged for the scholars/translators presenting the poetry that they had trouble speaking. At one point one of them said, after confessing that she did not understand the poem she had just translated, "After all, I have a doctorate!"

A person playing the piano--even, or perhaps most especially a child--pronounces with their fingers. Think about it. If a word can be reduced to its pronunciation or its dictionary definition an esteemed Ph.D. will never be caught in public confessing awe at its power. If a tone on the piano could really be reduced to its fingering you might not have had to quit taking piano lessons.

Think about it.