This weekend is a conference on The Musical Ear at the University of Indiana, which houses a prominent school of music. I am curious to hear what the speakers have to say. There is a strong tendency to normalize musical hearing, a tendency which has always made me uncomfortable as my musical ear is not normalize-able, thank you very much.

My work with children convinces me that no one's ear should be regarded as normalize-able. In fact, if allowed to develop idiosyncratically the ear becomes as much a gateway to integrated thinking as words might, visual acuity or involvement in body movement.

Idiosyncratic development starts with music of the present day, so that musical listening is not equated with sonorities of the 18th century. Those sonorities, firmly ensconced in too much musical training, easily breed right-note / wrong-note thinking. That is like having to stay inside the lines in the coloring books I grew up with, as though staying inside the lines could be the point of any genuine activity.

A friend has come out with a a new book "Inside a Dog," in which she maintains that every dog has to be approached with respect and attentiveness. This applies equally well to tones. I often compare tones to dogs. If you are wise you don't assume anything about a dog until you give it a chance to respond to you.

In a very real way Classical sonatas are treatments of the vibrant life of individual tones on specific instruments.

Just this morning a student playing Mozart's only Sonata in G came to a passage in which F# sounds perfectly fine one instant, but when a bizarre interval is added into it, the same F# sounds out of tune. It is a fleeting effect: one that might throw an inexperienced player off balance but, at the same time, one that might invite an accomplished artist to inflect the line to make room for this extraordinary acoustical shiver--what in French is called a frisson.

Whether the subject is piano playing or new music our media-crazed culture seems to be favoring the mechanical, the standardized. Even in education that last word comes up with alarming frequency. Where is the great thrust of individual drive on which this country was built and which represents our culture, including our political system, at its most meaningful?

In my sense of things as a parent and educator much of that new drive is going to come not from frenzied competition to win prizes but from paying attention to the greater world we inhabit: the planet, our mutual habitat, and one another, including people with disabilities.

In the old days--the really old days, say 150 years ago--there was a real piano-teaching industry. This has been wonderfully described in the very readable Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History by Arthur Loesser. In the mid-1950's, when the book was written, people seemed to be losing interest in the piano and Loesser forecasts its demise.

We are clearly in a new era of piano fascination. But I fear that in our time people are relishing the technological aspects of the instrument rather than its magical sound. Modern recording and playback techniques have helped legitimatize the surface of the sound. Students are encouraged to play without pedal until they are "ready" and then to keep the unique resonance of the instrument under strict control. People are afraid to make a mess. But I am convinced that it was this very "mess" that has fascinated listeners since the day of the instrument's invention and that continues to inspire composition -- and, incidentally, to defy electronic synthesis.

I teach piano conceptually: it's as simple as that. This means I assume that all hands are different, that people grow and learn in different ways, that there is no method that works. Everyone has to be dealt with as an entire human being. I assume the power of music to organize physically, mentally and emotionally.

There is a place in my studio for the conservatory graduate whose deep instinctual musicality was nearly, but not completely, stifled by years of technique, technique and more technique; as well as for the developmentally challenged young man who learns in his own idiosyncratic fashion.

I listen to each one. Each is free to work at their own pace, to allow the profound synthesis that is music to penetrate their entire being, motivating work that exudes mastery, whether or not one practices hours and hours.

The mastery comes from awareness of detail, not as a matter of polish after "nailing" the notes, but as integral to the piece's power at every stage.

So much going on at once in a four-hand piece by Mozart! Each hand of each player is like a character in an opera.

One may be a king in full regalia, not supposed to let on that he is human despite moments when he is desperately torn between his feelings and proper decorum.

One is our hero, ready to take on all comers, but primarily in search of his beloved, who is concealed in there somewhere.

Then, of course, the beloved herself, perhaps the princess, under her own strictures regarding acceptable behavior, secretly dying to abandon home and princess-hood.

Ah yes, the wicked spirit hovering over all, casting spells, wreaking havoc.

Every note that each character plays is fraught with pushes and pulls like arguments with one's siblings. It is as if the note says "I want to go up!" while the sibling insists "You have to stay where you are!" Out of each minuscule fleeting conflict arises the power, the magic of the piece--time after time, in fact, perhaps even more so with every new hearing.

Many years ago Howard Gardner described our "multiple intelligences." I found his work deeply affirmative of the choice I had made early in my adult life to give precedence to my auditory mind. Formal education, it seemed to me, was organized primarily by visual and verbal experience. These were not the areas that mattered most to me. I made the choice to go with the ear--my own and that of others.

Now, many years later, I find that the formality of education begins already in pre-school with its over-emphasis on multiple choices (that is, tests) based on visual and verbal experience. In the meantime I have staked my entire life and career on the proposition that the auditory intelligence is one that binds people to one another in many powerful ways, not at all comparable to the visual or the verbal. This is not to put down the latter two; just to maintain that they are different.

How odd to realize that what I have felt all along to be most central to life is now considered "far out."