I have been trying to understand the writings of a prominent nineteenth-century music critic, Eduard Hanslick. As far as I can figure out, he is arguing against the emotional content of music, claiming for it instead something called beauty. Perhaps he was reacting against the overblown, emotionally charged hyperbole of much of the writing of his time, in which the words heroic and tragic were the most frequently used.

But there is the bath water and then there is the baby. Is color emotional? How can it not be? Doesn't everyone with a voice have a feeling associated with its intonation when singing, or speaking for that matter?

A music theory teacher in college maintained that music is, above all, a social art. This seems obvious at first glance, but I wonder if it social in the way that we usually intend the word?

I am a performer in part because I need music to be social, not in the sense that I need a room full of people in order to perform. There is more to it.

My ear works idiosyncratically, it always has. I could never explain how it works; I didn't need to because I knew that the audience followed it the way they would follow a story read aloud to them. They didn't need to agree or disagree; simply by listening (as opposed to walking out) they affirmed that the way I hear is interesting. That affirmation has been important to me since I was very young.

Being listened to is vital to a performing musician or composer. That's the social part.

Today a student rewarded me with a beautifully fluid reading of the Chopin G major Prelude, under tempo, of course, because she doesn't practice, but full of entirely pianistic nuance. In such hands, it is a study not in mechanical regularity but in the infinite color potential built into an instrument on which the smallest variants in finger position express nuances in the line.

I was not aware of the expressive power of the differently shaped and sized fingers of the two hands until after much damage had been done; I had believed that what looked regular on a piece of paper was supposed to sound that way.

A paper I recently read brought up the notion that not everyone hears the same way and that it is not necessarily a good idea to assume that everyone should, though music pedagogy goes to a lot of trouble to try to get that to happen.

I find it counterproductive to work toward that goal. The way I hear defines my musical self and that is who I am--it is my identity. It binds me to others who hear the way I hear. How do I know who they are? By listening to their music, whether they are living performers or composers no longer with us. The thought of losing that is intolerable.

The belief that we hear as individuals and are bound to others by the sheer power of that individuality is the basis of my teaching. The children I teach do not organize themselves in any systematic way around what they hear. Each hears as he or she hears and respects the auditory organization of the others. If there is a stronger basis for mindful music learning I cannot imagine it.

Let's talk about time. As a child I hated the metronome because it represented the impossible. It never agreed with me and it was entirely inflexible, so why bother? Then I heard Myra Hess play three Mozart concertos one afternoon with the Chicago Symphony. She certainly did not play in agreement with any metronome I knew about. So that was that.

But over, yes, time I figured out that it was actually a very useful toy. You could set it to beat every other beat while playing in 3/4 time, for example, or every three beats while playing in 4/4. This was actually fun.

Or you could play some very difficult passage at whatever tempo was comfortable for you (without the metronome, of course, since the metronome would not help in the comfort department). Then locate that comfort speed on the "ticker" and make a note of it in the margin of the page: July 22, 48 to the quarter note. Reset the metronome to the ultimately desired speed, say 96 to the quarter. Tick it a few times without playing.

Repeat this technique, playing and ticking but never both at the same time. Play; find your speed on the ticker; record it; tick your goal speed; walk away. You will probably find your daily speed edging faster.

The same technique works for slowing down--much harder for most people.

Recently I played a program tailor-made for an audience of octogenarians, a program made up entirely of pieces we had all studied sixty years ago. They were stunned to hear this music taken seriously.

The point I stress is that they (read, we) as children were not taken seriously. That great music was assigned to us because it was supposedly easy to play. If you show me anyone who can play octave chords in both hands ppp (as in the Rachmaninoff C# minor Prelude) easily I will fall over. If you find anyone who claims they can play the scales in Mozart's C major Sonata K. 545 effortlessly I will find it hard to believe.

Our feelings about the music were not considered. The possibility that the music might have real content did not enter into discussion. Was I the only one who felt humiliated by feeling wretched about these assignments?

Memory and familiarity are both complex forces at work in our consciousness of music. Playing from memory is important in traditional pedagogy, though I find it not at all clear that it improves anyone's playing, except those whose memorization is so integrated with auditory concentration that it never becomes a distraction.

Distraction renders memory meaningless or maybe even harmful. All kinds of things can become distractions: A muscle spasm can destroy continuity. Children playing from memory become aware of a resonance they had not previously noticed -- this happens mostly when playing in recitals on grand pianos with the lid up after having practiced on upright, muted and probably out-of-tune. A sudden rush of rich sound can turn the piano into a veritable mad dog. How do you just keep going?

Familiarity, too, has its downside. Humming the opening of Beethoven's Fifth does not mean we get it.

Maybe it would be better to focus on getting our bearings independent of a framework that assumes mindlessness to be a good idea.