The more I deal with young children the more I believe that true synthesis of body and brain is possible only when gross-motor coordination is adequately developed. Too-early emphasis on fine-motor skills keeps the child's function at a superficial level. A child forced in this way cannot tap the deep energy of individual perception and desire; every achievement is based on rote learning.

Many bright children are neglected in this regard: Parents and teachers are so delighted to have an obvious achiever that they fail to perceive the child's hidden needs. I recall such a feeling from my own childhood. "Can't they see how clumsy I am?"

I would be interested in knowing if you had similar feelings as a young learner.

Even people who really like to eat don't eat their favorite food all day long. A well-balanced diet makes the good stuff taste even better.

Music is more than a little like food. We need a well-balanced diet: some songs, some dances, some abstract pieces like fugues or sonata-allegro movements. (In fact a Classical sonata is a well-balanced diet with a sampling of each of the above.)

Just as we learn to eat well we can learn to savor music of varying types, periods, styles. Why not use this as an approach to musical satisfaction? It beats learning every new piece as if climbing yet another Himalaya.

Yesterday one of my young students who is as fluent with computers as I was with pianos in my youth, prompted me to observe that most people know their way around the piano the way I know my way around computers, which is to say, not in any depth.

I know the keyboard and can manage access to the Internet and some other on-line functions, but at the slightest unexpected turn I call for Tech Support. Many people play the piano in an analogous manner: with little awareness of what goes on inside the box (i.e., the strings) they feel hopelessly confused at the slightest surprise.

The trouble is that good music is crafted to be full of surprises large and small.

"No wonder we all hated playing these pieces."

I am fascinated by the music I hated as a child--and there was a lot of it! I now know that my dislike implied questions--real, even urgent questions. Why couldn't I articulate them?

In order to do so I would have had to trust myself as a listener. I would have had to say, "I don't like that sound" or "I am bored by Alberti basses."

Part of the dilemma comes from having to play music from distant cultures and eras. Most children lack a good working model on which to base confident personal taste. (Recordings, I am sorry to say, won't do as models for children as they are replicable, therefore not sufficiently of the moment--but that's another long story.)

I noticed already as a young teacher that children did not have comparable difficulty relating to 20th-century music, as these are the sounds that surround them -- in the movies, on TV. Many piano teachers seem to be unaware that the composers writing and arranging music for the media were for the most part trained as classical musicians. Some of them turned out masterful teaching material for young learners: Stan Applebaum, the late Fred Werle, Elie Siegmeister.

Trust and timing: two ingredients that transform the otherwise humdrum into utter delight. To be specific: There is a measure in the third movement of the Clementi Sonatina in C (the sonatina everyone plays and hates) which sounds truly awful though it appears innocently in the middle of an otherwise acceptable phrase. If it crosses your mind 1) that you really can't stand the way it sounds; 2) that it's the composer's "fault," not yours; 3) that it may be there for humorous purposes, then it may occur to you that you can get your listener to giggle aloud at the very moment when most young players covertly cringe.

This is where timing comes in: Just because every measure has the required number of beats does not mean that the measures follow one another mechanically in robotic succession. Masterful playing is based on the trust that all sounds are not equal. From there it follows that some sounds may be set apart, as if by special punctuation, so that their content is clear.

This is where the issue of a good edition becomes important. In a readily-available facsimile of the first printing of these sonatinas there are dynamics but almost no articulation markings--no phrasings. Therefore the student has to pay attention to the sounds. The commonly used edition is full of articulation errors that obliterate the actual content of these delightful works. No wonder we all hated playing them.

This morning a long-time student, a scientist, told me of a paper her lab had just submitted involving a six-year experiment. According to her people are not going to be too eager to replicate (i.e., to validate) the work: it will take too long.

Isn't this like the great experiment of education: How do we know what works since it takes so long to determine the outcome of any particular approach?

I am reminded of the colleague who told me many years ago that we couldn't teach our students to listen as they play because "it takes too long."

At the same time I recalled that sounds that haunted me at age 12 continued to haunt me until 45 years later I invented Tonal Refraction, a means of showing what it was that I had heard--and still respond to--so vividly.

(It is an important issue: See the posts of May 7 and June 28.)

For many people studying the piano means assuming what one adult called "obedience mode." Even while shuddering I see the point.

That particular form of obedience is actually quite self-destructive, for obedience implies the power to disobey while the authority traditionally ceded to one's piano teacher extends to the pleasure one takes in the music itself.

As long as we play to please the teacher--while usually in the dark as to what exactly that means--we are not learning to value our own standards. Even at less-advanced levels those standards involve no less than joy, satisfaction, fulfillment. Shouldn't the teacher be supporting these attributes rather than perpetuating the infantile state of never measuring up?