Is there a non-verbal equivalent to the text in instrumental music? I believe there is. Every instrument, except those in the category of electronica, has a distinctive timbre and specific acoustical properties distributed unevenly throughout its range.

No matter how hard the music establishment has tried to brainwash us into thinking the contrary, this is the case also for the piano. The various registers of the instrument are distinct and affect the total sound differently. Then let us not forget the mechanical/acoustical difference between white-key and black-key resonance.

Contemporary commerce-driven culture is eager to sell the public on the notion that it doesn't matter how pitch is produced since all pitches are interchangeable--correction, since musicians are trained to believe that producing interchangeable pitches is a good idea. A gifted young singer recently told me that even singers are being trained to perform to this standard.

All you have to do is go hear some really fine early-music players to be reminded of the extent to which lyricism is inherent in instruments as it is in the human voice. After all, most instruments were modeled after the voice.

Lately I have been making music together with a fine singer of French chansons, one of the things I most enjoy in all of music. Do I practice them? Not actually. But I sing them constantly: every idle moment a phrase of one or the other is wafting through my entire being. This is perhaps why I love songs so much: I am entirely at their mercy. Actually playing them together with the singer is like giving vent to one's deepest subconscious responses to the song. An ideal art form.

I wish it were possible to convince people that the number of notes one plays or the speed with which one plays them are not what make a performer compelling or even minimally interesting.

This past week I heard three ensemble performances, in only one of which the awareness of pitch was evident, indeed compellingly so. One situation was a Master Class in which graduate students at an eminent conservatory were unable to get interested in tone quality; speed was their only selling point. In the second case it was a highly recognized string quartet whose rhythmic coordination was outstanding but whose absence of tone put me literally to sleep in the one work they programmed that demanded tonal involvement. The third was a young opera company with an uneven assortment of voices and talents--when they were good they were very, very good indeed, and their pianist was exemplary. Not famous--just riveting.

There is a lot of talk among people who teach academic music theory about why so many students who are passionate about music do so poorly in theory classes. Some have even come out and said that music is as much about visual as about auditory experience.

Recently I was put in a position where I had to acknowledge in print that it took me years to be able to hear objectively--that is, without prejudicing my hearing by what I see on a printed page. The music I hear is valid; what I see is often stereotypical and not subject to the life of tones.

I have staked quite a lot on the difference, which constitutes a form of heresy among musical thinkers, so entrenched is the visual-analysis approach.

How do I know it doesn't work? Because of Mozart.

Somewhere early on I was given the impression that all major keys on the piano are interchangeable. Ha! Not so, McGee!

Children who are encouraged to notice how different they are can open a book of sonatas and get into subject matter before they have played a note.

Consider this: Are all books interchangeable? Doesn't it matter that you know the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Admittedly the categories have gotten out of hand in terms of book publishing and it is impossible to imagine a book that cannot be strictly departmentalized. My little book, What Might It Mean? An Uncommon Glossary of Musical Terms and Concepts for the Stuck, Bored, and Curious* is funny and yet dead serious, for adults young and old, for serious musicians as well as amateurs--even writers who don't know anything about music have found it insightful concerning criticism. Because it cannot be categorized I had to publish it myself.

The ability to tell the difference between something of specific relevance and something more general is a sign that one knows how to read, no?

*It is available on line, or you can contact me for a copy.

Last week my sixteen-year-old piano student, who doesn't "practice" but who plays a lot, wondered why Clementi's Preludes in A minor are so short when they are so beautiful.

Today she wondered why Mozart wrote only one piano sonata in that key, and whether Beethoven had written any. Fascinating question. (There are two sonatas for piano and violin but none for piano solo.) I sang for her what I consider to be the quintessential A minor piece: Der Leiermann from Schubert's Winterreise.

She told me she had been playing Chopin's A minor Prelude and played it for me, with some wrong notes, to be sure, but with such right sound that I was awed. Clearly she has a deep feeling for the sonorities of A minor, even though the tonality is only obliquely present in that piece. It is one of the most sophisticated pieces of music I know.

We had a talk about private vs. public piano playing. She is clearly a private player. If she wanted to play that piece for people she would have to get some experience doing so by inviting people -- any people -- to sit and listen to her. It is a personal choice, after all.

I recall at her age not being able to tolerate the mystery of that piece.

Yesterday a small group of amateur singers sight-read a Mozart four-part canon V'amo di core, which I had never sung before, though it has called out to me for many years. It turns out to be all about tenderness. And so it is, every note. The point is made right away with the first deviation from the obviously tunable notes of the tonic triad. He makes them risky in the most beautiful way.

I woke up this morning realizing how easily such fragile music gets destroyed by banging out the right notes on the piano rather than allowing (encouraging!) singers to puzzle out the emotional distances between pitches. It makes all the difference in the world.