Consider grace and elegance. For most mortals they exist in a fantasy world where there is no physical limitation -- no heaviness or awkwardness, everything functioning effortlessly without error or doubt.

I think I am describing what I call ear-pure listening, that is, listening ideally, as one imagines music.

Imagined music is music.

The keys of the piano are not what make the music. The music is made by the strings. Listening to the infinite wealth of complex vibration they release is what releases the grace and elegance of even the most awkward child. (Is there a child who doesn't believe her or himself to be that most awkward child?)

Someone asked me the other day to define what I teach. This is what I teach.

The critical part of yesterday's post is the imagined/remembered question: "Can't they see how clumsy I am?"--a question worthy of some spinning out.

A child honestly believes that adults can discern their every need: after all, don't they feed you when you are hungry and comfort you when you cry?

No matter how intelligent the child there are needs that only a specialist can detect because they know how to pay attention to the whole inarticulate being.

It does not require extraordinary sensitivity for a child to know "how clumsy" he or she is: being consistently the last one chosen for the team is a pretty clear indication of that. But musical talent may be for just such a child the sign that something else is going on--an alternative source of grace and elegance.

Talent does not make the need go away, however. Despite the praise (perhaps overly lavish by way of compensation for the more obvious clumsiness) the child may still feel clumsy, even while being applauded for playing the piano.

What makes your playing convincing is that you can respond quickly and effectively to your own musical insights, conscious or unconscious. A triumphant moment in one student's lesson last week occurred when she purposefully changed an articulation; I heard it and commented on it because it was so clear and so interesting. I pointed it out to her thinking that perhaps she had done it unconsciously, as often happens. Lo and behold! She had done it on purpose. The idea was her own, and it was a good idea. What pleased us both was that it had been clearly audible.

First steps to mastery.

The more I deal with young children the more I believe that true synthesis of body and brain is possible only when gross-motor coordination is adequately developed. Too-early emphasis on fine-motor skills keeps the child's function at a superficial level. A child forced in this way cannot tap the deep energy of individual perception and desire; every achievement is based on rote learning.

Many bright children are neglected in this regard: Parents and teachers are so delighted to have an obvious achiever that they fail to perceive the child's hidden needs. I recall such a feeling from my own childhood. "Can't they see how clumsy I am?"

I would be interested in knowing if you had similar feelings as a young learner.

Even people who really like to eat don't eat their favorite food all day long. A well-balanced diet makes the good stuff taste even better.

Music is more than a little like food. We need a well-balanced diet: some songs, some dances, some abstract pieces like fugues or sonata-allegro movements. (In fact a Classical sonata is a well-balanced diet with a sampling of each of the above.)

Just as we learn to eat well we can learn to savor music of varying types, periods, styles. Why not use this as an approach to musical satisfaction? It beats learning every new piece as if climbing yet another Himalaya.

Yesterday one of my young students who is as fluent with computers as I was with pianos in my youth, prompted me to observe that most people know their way around the piano the way I know my way around computers, which is to say, not in any depth.

I know the keyboard and can manage access to the Internet and some other on-line functions, but at the slightest unexpected turn I call for Tech Support. Many people play the piano in an analogous manner: with little awareness of what goes on inside the box (i.e., the strings) they feel hopelessly confused at the slightest surprise.

The trouble is that good music is crafted to be full of surprises large and small.

"No wonder we all hated playing these pieces."

I am fascinated by the music I hated as a child--and there was a lot of it! I now know that my dislike implied questions--real, even urgent questions. Why couldn't I articulate them?

In order to do so I would have had to trust myself as a listener. I would have had to say, "I don't like that sound" or "I am bored by Alberti basses."

Part of the dilemma comes from having to play music from distant cultures and eras. Most children lack a good working model on which to base confident personal taste. (Recordings, I am sorry to say, won't do as models for children as they are replicable, therefore not sufficiently of the moment--but that's another long story.)

I noticed already as a young teacher that children did not have comparable difficulty relating to 20th-century music, as these are the sounds that surround them -- in the movies, on TV. Many piano teachers seem to be unaware that the composers writing and arranging music for the media were for the most part trained as classical musicians. Some of them turned out masterful teaching material for young learners: Stan Applebaum, the late Fred Werle, Elie Siegmeister.