Music is such a totally engrossing activity--it makes sense that it holds out to anyone with disability the promise of a holistic life.

There are many problems, however. I cannot begin to name them all or pretend to deal with them. But I know that people with physical disabilities, major or minor, wrestle with the conflict between bodily and mental commands and responses. As someone who had trouble obeying physical instructions I very much resented anyone insisting that I do so, or even positing this as a norm. Most of my solutions were worked out in my head, in my imagination, at my own speed and in my own time.

This has saved my musical life and my spirit remains intact. It pretty well sums up the way I work with young learners and so far I see ample evidence that it is successful in terms of their learning processes, their motivations and their spirit. It has nothing to do with being competitive or measuring up to anyone else but one's own potential, whatever that may be.

So, in ten words or less, what is the reason?

Why do we learn to factor integers in various ways? Beethoven spends a lot of musical energy refactoring simple meters so that it is impossible to tire of them. But, not knowing that, most of us never advance beyond counting to two in a 2/4 bar.

For that reason I have often fantasized about staging a massive "happening" where quarter-note balloons would be positioned along all the major arteries and on all the bridges around Manhattan (why not the world?) and at a given signal all would be popped, once and for all.

I firmly believe that a person going into third year of high school is capable of understanding all kinds of things that in my day were not considered appropriate for young minds. Why play sonatas by Beethoven? was a question that arose in my mind at about that age. It is a difficult question to ask and a harder one to answer.

Many young people that age are given, as I was, the task of learning to play these works without the foggiest idea of what we are doing, let alone why.

My student is working, at her own request, on improving her rhythmic control. We use Vol. I of the Beethoven sonatas to work on this problem. This is the routine: She opens the book at random and spots a passage that seems playable. Today it was the second phrase in the A major Sonata, Op. 2 No. 2. It looks straightforward but, as must happen to everyone who reads it for the first time, her fingers were soon tied up in knots (as well as notes).

The meter is 2/4. Considering the length of a slurred group to be a single unit of rhythm there is a problem because one slur group is 1 1/2 beats while another is 4 bars, which is 5 x 1 and 1/2 plus 1/2. This proposition is so amusing and so obviously what holds the passage together that she was soon able to play it because it had been properly parsed.

Where does the idea originate, do you suppose? Contrary to what one would expect, in the opening idea the set of four 32nds is slurred into the following quarter--a most unusual occurrence--making a total of 1 and 1/2 beats. Did you ever notice that?

Did I ever notice that?

If I had to choose a single element of music theory that has most interfered with my understanding of how the ear works it would be the notion of tonicity.

More important to the ear than the tonality of a composition is the history of what and how one hears, in other words, the tones in the order in which they are presented. Just because the tonic may come first does not mean it is a solid tone--I can think of several examples of works that begin with unsettling tonic tones or even triads.

Taking the first tone of every composition seriously also illuminates the beginnings of many interior movements and many single pieces within a cycle: often the first tone can only be understood in relation to the last tone of the preceding movement.

We do strange things to ourselves in the process of acquiring culture with a capital K. We get ourselves to believe that there are twelve tones in the octave and are so surprised that composers come up with twenty-three (see Allan Kozzin's article in yesterday's New York Times). There are actually millions of tones out of which different cultures choose a manageable number to which they pitch their songs and their instruments. When western composers write well for the traditional orchestra they are releasing many more tones than those in the notated score: all them overtones!

And the piano? It was always a microtonal instrument and it still is. Only our insistence on those twelve keys keeps us from hearing that.

I had a great row with a quite prominent musician/teacher/authority on the subject. He was aghast at the notion. Then why, I ask, did Brahms routinely account for 21 tones in the octave, and Schubert 24 in his posthumous B-flat Sonata?

The keys are not the sound.

Let's think about speed: I think it's fair to say that Beethoven developed the notion of musical speed more explicitly than anyone else, specifically the direct connection between the very fast and the very slow. I am convinced that he responded to the vibration speed in slow tempos, of which most of us are entirely unaware.

One of my students is incredibly aware of that speed and, oddly, it slows down his superficial motor responses. It is an internal involvement which has required of me that I learn to hear and respect it. This is the student who plays a Beethoven sound more expressively than I can imagine doing myself. I am convinced that he responds to the piano in a manner comparable to Beethoven's, otherwise he could not intuitively find such a sound.

The sound defies theoretical identification or description much the way that piano sound defies electronic synthesis.

Playing painlessly is like holding your nose when you swallow something you expect to taste awful. But what if you are holding your nose all the time?

The best image for playing painlessly remains Milt Gross's brilliant solution to King Midas breaking his teeth when he chewed his peas: He had a vassal stand in the corner with a pea shooter to shoot the peas directly into his gullet so that he could swallow them without chewing them.

If you do an Internet search for Nize Baby you will find some lovely peas on which to chew.