Comparing the young people of yesterday's post with myself at their age is revealing. I can't recall a time when I didn't play--it was the most natural thing in the world. Though most people would undoubtedly say that I did it very well, I knew that critical elements of technique eluded me. I could not figure out why.

Because I really wanted to play solving that problem became the central pursuit of my musical life. I knew that if I figured out how to play the piano I would have figured out how to live.

Neither of yesterday's young people is a natural piano player. Neither is obsessed with the instrument and I don't expect them to pretend that they are. Our mutual understanding on this point and my conviction that there is more to it than the mechanics of playing frees them to enjoy each other and to dig the music.

They are both well past the age when most kids quit. Showing up promptly at 8:30 every Saturday morning is a sign of how important this is to them. Yet I know that neither would make it into the school where I taught young people until the school's policy became dependent on competition for admissions and advancement.

The point is that uniform emphasis on the physical aspects of playing discourages some really intelligent and passionate kids from studying serious--not the same as humorless--music.

"Oh no! This is evil!" This was the reaction of two teenagers sightreading the final variation of Mozart's Theme and Variations for piano four-hands. After pages of interchanged triplets and thirty-seconds suddenly out of nowhere sixteenths! The nerve.

They couldn't get over how all this trickery emerged from such a "dinky-sounding" theme.

Hard? Sure. But better than hard is provoking, and best of all is laughter-provoking.

Sometimes I think that reading music actually gets in the way of listening to music. For many people who play the piano the notation is like an old Fred Astaire dance step diagram: Put one foot here and the other there and --presto!-- a foxtrot.

Do you recognize a musical non-sequitor when you hear one?

Just because you have a finger lined up to play the next note does not mean that the next sound follows that glibly.

Just because the note values in a measure add up to the right number of beats does not mean that the timing is uniform throughout.

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.