Thinking about everyone having access to intense responses to tone: I find that for many people music instruction actually dims those responses. (You know the expression about a little learning being dangerous.)

It is possible to get back in touch with those deep experiences--in fact, helping people achieve that constitutes a large part of my work. It could even be said that it is the story of my own musical life.

In the work I do with children my goal is to not disturb their confident access to their innermost musicality. Interestingly, for each child this requires a unique trajectory. That is why they must also learn to play together with one another and why they do so without regimentation but with mutual confidence.

Beats, measures and bar lines all look so innocent. All you need to do is figure out the arithmetic and then count, count, count!

It works until you start to react to actual sounds.

The other evening I heard Marc Ponthus play Schumann's Kreisleriana with breathtaking intensity: at times faster than fast (as specified by the composer), at times surpassing slow (also specified). It was a beautiful lesson in the fantasy life of tone.

Even children and people with limited physical capability have access to that level of insight, power, and satisfaction.

It's not just sounds that can cause dismay: how about quarter notes? This morning the uncomfortable quarter note appeared in the early E-flat Sonata of Mozart: An innocent tonic chord in root position perched almost intolerably on the second beat of the bar, dying to move.

We don't usually think of rhythm as dissonant, especially in music of the Classical period. But there it is, impudent as all get-out, the teenage Wolfgang writing something his father surely did not approve of--as my student put it: "Like rock and roll."

Pleasing your own ear has its beginnings in acknowledging that you like some sounds better than others. As soon as you realize that you don't like a sound--for whatever reason, or for no apparent reason at all--you are on the way to a dramatic "plot line" for a piece. Getting from a sound we do like to a sound we don't like and doing so on purpose is quite like telling a story.

Thinking about singing tone: Many pianists play with a singing tone because they know how to do it not because they hear what a difference it makes.

The more music I hear (and play) the more I am convinced that it is involvement with sound that conveys feeling. The feeling itself is not literal. When attempts are made to make it literal (as in sad or mournful) it becomes rehash. Nothing could be more phony or more boring.

Why are professionals so afraid of amateurs? Isn't it obvious that people play sports because they enjoy doing so? The ones who can produce reliably under pressure become pro's. Once money enters into the picture it becomes irrelevant whether or not they still enjoy playing.

When kids get interested in sports or in music the degree of their obsession usually becomes clear early on. A kid who is obsessed with the piano will play nonstop, as I did, starting at 6:30 A.M. every day. (Note I said "play" rather than "practice.") Why shouldn't kids who are not so inclined be taught to love their playing because they love music? Isn't loving music the whole entire point? More simply put, why can't we get used to the idea that cultivating mature musicality (on a non-professional track) requires a special kind of training: that in which the ear that demands satisfaction is not the teacher's or the parent's, but the child's?

Isn't that preferable to producing generations of quitters who hate themselves for quitting, and who wouldn't dream of inflicting piano lessons on their own children?

Two questions that emerge from my life as a teacher who is fascinated by the disadvantaged:

Why was I so fiercely determined to play the piano even though it was obvious to people who know the technical aspects of playing that it was never easy for me to do so?

Because I was fascinated by the sound of the instrument: I had always loved it.

Why was I drawn, already at an early age, to music by Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Debussy?

Because in their music I recognized the sound that I loved so much.

These things are the basis of all my teaching: love of the sound and finding in music--any music--connections to that love.