Musical training all too often seems to require suppressing the gut reactions I have been contemplating lately. This is strange because, as it turns out, the students who are labeled "gifted" are those who manage to preserve some of that reaction, though customarily so buried by the time they are young adults that they no longer know how to access these reactions consciously.

As for those who consider themselves (or who have been labeled) less gifted this means that they don't believe in the validity of such responses.

Either event is a waste.

One of the blog followers in Sweden (greetings!) wanted to know what a "gut" reaction was. Interesting question.

It is the reaction you have before you know you are having a reaction. According to way I understand the ear it is often what makes us "miss" notes. Our ear leads us to a choice of note that doesn't happen to agree with the composer's choice. This implies an element of conflict. This conflict is the beginning of meaningful interpretation.

Musicians tend to be trained out of having gut reactions because they are dangerous.

Children and amateurs are vulnerable to them. That's why I love working with them--I learn so much about how the ear works.

There stood the Clementi exercise, looking like clockwork: scales up, scales down, parallel motion, contrary motion.

Here sat an attentive 16-year-old with a cultivated ear, feeling her way through the scales one at a time, first one hand then the other, commenting on how beautiful each was, or how odd.

It was, to my mind, an ideal lesson in technique: you get your hand to model the sounds you hear as the scale unfold--quite unlike repeating formulas of tone and of fingering.

In the course of this past week I have had in-depth conversations with four colleagues, none of them personal friends, on the subject of temperament--not the diva-tantrum variety, but the tuning variety, as in equal temperament. These included a musicologist, professional keyboard player, singer, and composer. Each expressed malaise with equal temperament. Each had devised a way of dealing with it -- some by opting out of it altogether. These latter choose a diet of early music tuned to some kind of mean tone or just intonation--the way I used to tune my harpsichord in the days when I played harpsichord.

I love the sound of the piano though I am deeply sensitive to the differences in tuning. That's why I keep up my a cappella singing--teaching sight singing by teaching tuning and singing with advanced musicians just for the fun of it.

I do believe one can have it both ways. But it definitely takes thought and discipline.

My work is primarily with listening. No intellectual knowledge is required to have reactions to music. None. In fact, the less conscious interference the better.

That is why children are so important. They react involuntarily. It is up to teachers and parents to spot and interpret their reactions. Sometimes a child does not practice because their piano is out of tune. (I have seen that more than once.) Sometimes it is because a particular interval in a piece growls at them every time they play it. (I have seen that, too: one child cried at the offending sound; another simply took her hands off the keyboard and refused to go on.)

Individual sounds are more real to children than to adults who are used to hearing in context. I asked one child if it sounded as bad when I played it, to which she replied, "No, because you know what is coming next."

Yet I have seen many adults deny that their gut reactions to sound have anything to do with meaning.

The purpose of teaching a child to read music is not that they can sit down and rattle off notes but that they understand what they are hearing. My ten-year-old student knows when Haydn is teasing. She doesn't need to be told what to do about it. She can play so that you know where the joke lies, and she does it tastefully without any coaching.

How old were you before you realized that Haydn had a sense of audible humor?

It was as I suspected it would be: whereas the tones themselves convey all there needs to be of spirituality the performer, apparently unaware of that, had to pour it on.

It would be like looking at a Cezanne still life and outlining the apples as if that is all there was to it. To make the apple more beautiful you might use a red marker instead of a pencil.