Today began with a Mozart upbeat. If you were taught, as I was, that upbeats are followed by downbeats you probably miss the wit of Mozart's masterful upbeats. They often lead in the wrong direction, pointing down when up would be more appropriate. Or the other way around.

This is why a good edition is so important: For much of the 19th and 20th centuries phrasing entailed an up / down inevitabiliy--the equivalent of the marching iambs of high school poetry class: I WANdered LONEly AS a CLOUD. Dealing with the original articulations yields the constant possibility of suspense, of deception, of unresolved endings -- in short, of much greater playfulness.

What keeps music fresh? Not ideas. Not interpretation.

Listening.

If the ear of the player is engaged repetition is impossible. Live sound comprises too many variables. Very young children are fascinated by them. It's too bad that they so easily get obscured by drilling and other mindless repetition.

All that is achieved by drilling and mindless repetition is the reduction of parental anxiety.

Is your child developing in conformity with other children the same age?
Are you getting your money's worth?

Same old. Same old. How better to describe the life of a piano teacher?

Unless the piano's essential magic is the subject, the motive and the goal all at once it is hard to avoid repetitive listening syndrome.

Yesterday I heard a CD that propelled me anew into the radical world of the piano: Piotr Anderszewski playing Mazurkas, Ballades and Polonaises--works I thought I knew.

My musical life began at the age of three fooling around on a neighbor's piano. I must have explored quite a range of exciting sounds, none of which I needed to identify since there was no teacher within earshot and I was completely on my own.

With the onset of lessons several years later I began to equate consonance with beauty (perhaps reflecting the bias of my teacher). In fact, I developed quite an intolerance for dissonance about which I was completely indiscriminatory: whether by Bach or Mozart, I didn't like the sound and would either "correct" it or turn the page.

At no time was my attention drawn to the significant difference in the sensations of consonance vs. dissonance. I use the word "significant" on purpose, for I persist in believing that these sensations are the beginning of the discernment of meaning in music.

I firmly believe that a grasp of dissonance is fundamental to musical health already at the early stages, just as unhappy things must happen in the stories that children read.

Leave it to a fifteen-year-old: After work on a singing tone in a John Field piece I asked her what was the difference between this and a work by Mozart. "Mozart wouldn't have written something that was only beautiful."

Hans Neumann, an exceptionally thoughtful teacher, remarked that the trouble with teaching children is that eventually they have to repudiate your work with them. I took this as a challenge: Why not develop a way of teaching children that they would not want to outgrow? Why not teach them from the outset that the real power of music is within them?

It takes a long time to test the results of such pedagogy. But the proof that it works is that several of my once-child students still return for musical refreshment, now on an entirely mutual footing.

As it turns out that this experiment resembles the cutting edge of what some music theorists are concerned with, namely the relation of body to mind in dealing with music. The difference is that my work was never theoretical, but was always based on the innate musicality of each individual child.

Hans von Bulow is quoted as saying that technical exercises should be assigned the way toxic medicine is given out--in carefully controlled dosages. Every body, every hand, is unique. The synthesis between body and mind is the precious possession of each of us and the work of a lifetime. It must not, cannot be regimented.

Many pianists are raised (as I was) with a lot of hifalutin vocabulary about "meaning" in music. The more seriously I pay attention to the way children experience sound the more I believe that the meaning--what one student called "the music part" is inherent in the act of perception.

It is extremely specific. Take a sound that is stable--the perfect fifth A E, for example. Changing the A to D a 9th below E, is enough to make a child cry or want to stop playing the piece. In effect the child is expressing a question: What have you done to my beautiful E? In time the child can learn to pose subsequent questions, such as: Will my beloved E ever come back? Why would anyone do such a thing on purpose?

Every such question, with or without an answer, yields the ability to play the piece as if telling a story--every time.