Continuing: The issue is to notice when deviation becomes distortion.

The other day I was recalling hearing Myra Hess play three Mozart piano concertos one afternoon in Chicago. I was about twelve. All I remember is that she was revered by my teacher, that she played with the music, and that her scales were unacceptable. Years later a violinist colleague recalled hearing Fritz Kreisler play in Chicago at about the same time in her life, remembering specifically how sloppy his playing was. We agreed that we would give our eye-teeth to hear such bad playing again.

Traditionally teachers go to great pains to make children conform to steady beats while many psychologists and musical thinkers (Jeanne Bamberger, among them) are coming to the thoroughly researched conclusion that there is no such thing.

Is it true that musical sound takes on a life of its own in the mind of anyone or everyone who hears it?

How else account for the different versions of "The Saint James Infirm'ry" by so many music greats? How else account for the unmistakable touch of Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin or Glenn Gould's Bach? All question of taste aside there is a lot of room for play here--literally.

If that is so, why aren't we prepared to deal with a similar range of play in relation to our own playing, or that of our friends? Why are we (perhaps I mean specifically we piano teachers) so intent on all young learners sounding the same?

Why is deviation regarded as threatening in one part of town while warmly praised in another?

Listening attentively to my young students' playing has been quite a challenge -- one of the hardest things I have ever had to learn. It has brought about a significant change in how I think about music.

What is music? The question is occupying philosophers and music theorists now that "music" is increasingly defined as recordings. The discussions, which might seem arcane in the abstract, become urgent when viewed in the light of human experience. I take a broad view of what music is. That is, I find it has less and less to do with pre-recorded versions of the printed score and more and more to do with what individuals make of specific sounds.

Perhaps that's why I feel that my students would be as at home playing and listening to avant-garde as to more traditional music.

It is utterly fascinating that adolescents, just arriving at self-awareness, are patient with details when allowed to be. A four-hand work by Mozart is exquisitely crafted of one detail after another, combining likely sounds with unlikely rhythms or the other way around, in maddeningly unpredictable fasion. This makes rattling the piece off completely impossible, as those pesky sounds have a way of increasingly disturbing our equilibrium as we become familiar with "the music"--whatever that is!

I contrast their fascination with the memory of my own impatience at their age, feeling always the pressure of not measuring up and, in turn, being quick to look down my nose at anyone less accomplished than myself.

In a climate of mutual awareness one learns self-awareness. The two together are critical to a grasp of the artistry of Mozart.

I can't imagine anything more satisfying than seeing the face of a fifteen-year-old light up at the realization that she can make some ordinary chord progression sound like the best idea in the world by noticing how the overtones mix and letting her fingers respond on the piano.

It is the light of artistry. It is mastery. It is, to be sure, fleeting because the girl does not spend hours at the piano. But it is an experience that never comes to many young people who do spend those hours at the piano because their hearing has become jaded with too much external product and not enough inner awareness.

Memorizing the alphabet, counting reliably to ten, getting the notes of the scale in order--any of these details, if imposed too soon, can block the flow of magic that creates music and poetry or stimulates fascination with numbers. People who were always good at these rote-learned systems are probably as shocked as I was when I first heard people talk about how restrictive the alphabet actually is, or how many words the Inuit people have for snow.

This morning I was reading an essay by Alison Gopnik in the August 16 New York Times on the subject of how young children characteristically explore, as opposed to adults who exploit. Taking tone as the object of exploration young children should be encouraged to move freely within a range of sounds that correspond to the ringing of bells or the piano played with the pedal down. This is quite the opposite of the fashionable regimen of Mozart CDs.

Young children, once aroused by this vast mysterious richness, don't lose interest in sound. On the contrary, they hear and respond confidently to aspects of tone that the force-fed, young and old alike, miss.