Never underestimate the power of an image. I am thinking a lot these days about the image of the major scale: Unfortunately it is imprinted on our brains both visually (as a ladder, primarily for ascending) and in sound (as an auditory symbol of utter stability). The fact is that the scale is, in a definition I read somewhere long ago and unfortunately did not write down the attribution, a combination of melodic fragments.

My work with Tonal Refraction permits musicians to depict the relationships between scale tones as they hear them, not according to the "correct" visual imprint. The results are surprising and have released seemingly intractable blocks to reading and to physical coordination. For me it has provided insight into the nature of musical themes, many of which express just such repositionings of the tones of the scale: Brahms Piano Trio in C, Op. 87, for instance, or many piano sonatas from all periods.

Many people hear the 6th degree of the scale as lower than the tonic. This re-formulation of the scale is frequently encountered in classical music.

Some serious and even interesting people have begun asking "What is music?" It becomes an urgent question these days when so much that passes for music bombards us: on "hold," in the elevator, in stores, not to mention the venues in which musicians dutifully plod through the classics.

I think often of Leonard Bernstein's wonderful song: I Hate Music but I Love to Sing!

Hilarity is one of my favorite topics partly, I think, because it seems to be a forbidden aspect of music. It doesn't occur to most serious musicians that Rachmaninoff deliberately plants a wrong note throughout most of a piece of music so that when he finally gets it right it will sound wrong. Similarly, it doesn't occur to most musicians that Beethoven is actually writing 5's plus 3's in duple meter, boring you to tears trying to get 2's or 4's to work until you discover the hidden clue and then delighting you to pieces every time.

Funny how closely allied they are: boredom and hilarity.

A couple of weeks ago I told my two young duo students that they were in a terrific position to do a bang-up job on the Rachmaninoff Waltz they are studying. They thought I was crazy.

Today I let them rehearse on their own. I kept hearing laughter, not complaints or groans. There were errors, but there was laughter.

That is the point: this maddening work, full of on-purpose wrong notes and very difficult rests (!) is hilarious. If it isn't, well....

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?