In the same way that boiling a chicken takes longer than boiling an egg, rhythm and tone may be "cooked" separately. I go to a lot of inventive trouble to accomplish this out of conviction that the synthesis is best left up to the individual child. It is, after all, no less than the stuff of mastery.

Rhythm is commonly thought of as beats. Actually it is as much duration and release as the onset of a pulse. Attention to its inner parts, so to speak, provides a reliable basis for good ensemble musicianship.

Tone is commonly equated with something as discrete as a piano key, though even that single key gives off a mix of overtones too complex to be electronically synthesized. Awareness of this complexity arouses endless fascination.

These things are as true for five-year-olds as for adults--maybe even truer.

The time has come to consider chickens and eggs: rhythm and tone. Which comes first? In fairness I have to concede that it all depends.

For some people there is no problem giving rhythm priority. But for many others, myself included, awareness of tone can be so intense that it literally drowns out rhythm. In my case it was specifically awareness of piano tone. When at 15 I switched to organ there was no problem because the sound of the organ is so different, as is the coordination at the instrument.

My work with Tonal Refraction reveals that many others have similar perceptual imbalances. Some of these people are extremely gifted instrumentalists who are constantly being humiliated because they "can't count."

After many such experiences I had one lesson with Mieczyslaw Horszowski whose first reaction to my Schubert sonata was: "Your playing is quite mature. You do very interesting things with the rhythm. People are going to try to fix it. Don't let anybody fix it." The work of fixing it myself took a while but I felt marvelously supported every step of the way.

Giving priority to tone yields fascination with sound--a solid source of fascination with the piano and a reliable reason to not quit at age 15.

It is no wonder that the piano is associated with mechanical gizmo's: player pianos, piano rolls and their electronic progeny and so on. A lot of piano training seems to be tied up with that ideal, especially insofar as the player is usually not taught what it feels like to be an active listener.

One quite established piano pedagogy specialist once confided to me that "that takes too long."

About the slightest impulses I referred to yesterday in addressing fingering: What we call "classical music" is all about slight impulses, really, as opposed to tunes that you whistle or the cliche reruns of your favorite Beethoven symphony.

There are basically two types. First and foremost is tone--not just what tone, but exactly how sharp or flat, how loud or soft, how begun and how ended. Tone is the fastest, slightest impulse--the one embodying the fleeting nano-second that constitutes magic to the small child and during which the mature musician makes countless decisions.

I put rhythm second because it is learned as motor responses and these are always slower, i.e., ploddier, than one's awareness of the magic of tone. Rhythm, customarily learned in terms of exercises and repeated patterns, readily obscures tone and quickly leads to boredom.

So what if you can play fast and are not really paying attention to those slightest impulses?

We can't talk about fingering without considering how wonderfully unique every hand is and how precisely it responds to the slightest impulses. Add to this how variable pianos are and how infite the touch and articulation potential of each. In the light of these two rich givens expecting that one should or might want to use the same fingerings every time one plays a passage is to reduce piano playing to the merely mechanical.

The piano is not like a stringed instrument, on which the placement of the hand in certain positions is critical to developing a sense of how the instrument works. Also, unlike stringed instruments, we don't have child-sized pianos! I work out detailed fingerings only for extremely awkward passages though when performing I let my fingers go their way. Wanda Landowska expressed it perfectly when she said that the fingers find their way just as horses find the way home in the snow.

Even young children, given the freedom to cultivate the responsiveness of their hands, enjoy the heightened sense of mastery that comes with fresh experience every time they play a piece. They don't anticipate a repetition of a prior hearing and so they develop their own standard for performance. Their standard tends to be quite high as is their delight at achieving a particularly pleasing color or articulation.

The powerful connection between the ear and the fingers is too important to be assumed -- or anesthetized.

Thinking about sonatas: Most of us learn them as if the goal is to play them through from start to finish. Once that is drilled into our fingers it is like pulling teeth to attach the notion of a sonata to meaning.

A sonata is a collection of pieces: a dance, a song, and a puzzle piece or two, usually a sonata form or a rondo. The sonata form, usually the opening movement, is not a narrative. Rarely does it begin with a clear statement either of the key or the meter. The clarity is hidden somewhere within the movement.

Perhaps that explains the necessity of repeating the first section: Since the beginning does not make full sense when played first off it has to come around again a second time in the context of other material before we get a feeling of knowing where we are.

I always thought that the saddest thing would be to have a child who didn't want something so badly that they would do anything to get or achieve it. But I remember how secret my own wanting was: I could never have voiced it -- perhaps I should say I would never have voiced it for by the time I reached adulthood I had experienced disappointment so many times that I knew I had better keep it a secret.

Now that I have achieved what I most deeply wanted--which is, to play a page of Mozart to my own satisfaction--I feel that my job as a teacher is to help young people give voice to their reactions as they learn, as they play music.

One of my young students wanted so badly to play a piece her friend played. But mastery of the piece turned out to be a dead-end street: she couldn't build a house on envy.