Yesterday I experienced a kind of Proustian moment in relation to specific sounds in Mozart piano sonatas. I recall as a child having pronounced reactions to specific sounds in those sonatas. The sounds I liked were mostly cadences in C Major, though in general I found that to be a "boring" key. There were some others, but not as consistently identifiable.

The agreeable sounds were surrounded by sounds I most particularly did not like. When they occurred I would turn the page. I played a sonata from beginning to end only on assignment, in which case I spent a lot of time holding my auditory nose.

Now, fascinated by the implications of these contrasting feelings, I am going back over the material, this time with an informed ear. I am astounded to learn the legitimacy of my child reactions.

The point I am making is that primary impressions are key to engaging the imaginative intelligence of a musical child. All the schooling in the world should reinforce, not diminish their integrity. Would that it were so.

Today I listened as my two teenage students made a Stravinsky duo come to life, literally, in their ears and in their fingers. It took some self-discipline on my part but I did not want to interfere by checking whether they were playing all the right notes. Working on their own, they self-corrected with each repetition while developing a clear image of how the music wanted to sound.

For me it was like giving them a promotion and a raise in pay to trust them to work through this difficult music with minimal interference on my part.

Fear is clearly a factor in the musical lives of too many people, mostly fear of making mistakes. If the mind has a logical involvement with tone as it clearly does with color, with numbers, and with many other aspects of life experience, then it would seem logical that musical people will no more play "wrong" notes than they will make missteps on a cliff-side path.

The trouble is that we learn notated music as the equivalent of a Fred Astaire dance step floor pattern. It isn't. Period. It represents, as Karl Ulrich Schnabel repeatedly pointed out, an ideal reading of a compositional proposition within which there is considerable leeway. It's just that we have been so frightened of error that we can't enjoy the range of possibilities that any line of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or Hindemith offers for our participation.

It took a long time to make the plunge, but now that I have ditched the "right note/ wrong note" school of piano teaching I find that almost all my students want to make music of their own. Coming naturally, it seems to affirm a source of individual expression that I would not otherwise know how to achieve. Knowing I listen attentively to their music makes them play all other music with deeper concentration.

Today I am all caught up in the implications of a brief exchange with a musician about tunings of keyboard instruments before the era of equal temperament - put by Ross Duffin (How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony and Why You Should Care) as 1916. This musician, who has perfect pitch, confessed that he can't really tell the difference between one temperament and another.

Do these minuscule differences matter?

It has long seemed to me that the piano is a kind of translating instrument: its pitch can be made compatible with all kinds of other pitches simply by respecting the specific ways in which instruments and voices tune among themselves and not getting in their way. It is ironic that so much early instrumental instruction is based on having children match piano pitch, when it should be the other way around: young piano students should be made sensitive to string and vocal intonation.

Recently I heard an a capella choir that was entirely out of tune with itself. The notes were all there and they were probably correct but, having been matched to piano pitch, they were entirely unconvincing.

This blog is definitely contributing to making the world smaller. Before attending to my post this morning I received an email from a follower in Sweden who was deterred by cold weather from attending a concert the preceding evening. Feeling relatively secure in her company I confess that I, too, was deterred from attending the concert I had planned to attend by a combination of the cold and a cold.

Instead I wrote a brief history of music in the 20th century as reflected in the life of a pianist who had lived through 2/3 of it. It has occurred to me that my musical life has paralleled many aspects of the century's musical trajectories. It began with fooling around on the piano, no formal instruction, no notation, no model of how piano-playing should look or sound. From there it went to lessons with a Wagnerite. After a few decades surviving that fad came the plunge into the originality-crazed modernism-at-all-costs movements of the late 50's.

Saved by a love of the sound of the piano and by continuing involvement with vocal tuning (I am a dedicated amateur a capella singer), I realized the limitations of such modernism. At about that time many musicians became fascinated with music of earlier periods--having been trained as an organist Baroque music was familiar terrain for me. But here was a new approach to string and wind playing and to singing that affected the whole musical scene.

Composers and players alike began asserting their love of sound. It was happening not just uptown but also downtown, in the clubs where improvisers playing all kinds of "classical" instruments were fooling around, as I had done as a small child, but with chops.

It feels like a triumph of individuality over trends, of grounded exploration over regimentation. At least in music things seem to have opened up more than just a bit.

I have already begun to pay attention, if not literally to listen, to the concert I am going to hear this evening. It features a group about which I know nothing except that I have had some contact with its conductor. A piece will be premiered by a composer about whom I know nothing. So why will I go, despite the fact that it is very cold outside, that the event takes place in an inconvenient location, a venue I do not particularly enjoy?

Curiosity. What will the new music be like? What kind of vibes will the performers project? Will it grab me or leave me (literally) cold?

Curiosity is a good basis for listening to all music. Yesterday an almost-ten-year-old, expecting to like a piece by Beethoven--a piece of her own selection, found it uninteresting. A few years ago another child of the same age had pronounced the piece "boring." This led to a question: Would Beethoven intentionally have written a boring piece? My conclusion is a most definite yes. Beethoven and Clementi are two composers that wrote boring music, surely aware of what they were doing. They even used specific descriptive words--German (a la Tedesco), or Swiss--to signal parodies of what would have been for them the equivalent of hillbilly music.

The name Beethoven inspires all kinds of anticipatory emotions, sometimes satisfied, sometimes not. If not, how come? To ask the question requires an objectivity that seems to come more naturally to children than to adults.

Attentiveness and irresistible may seem to be unrelated words, though when it comes to performance they are almost synonymous. An attentive performer makes the music irresistible.

One of the greatest compliments I have ever received was when, just after store opening on the morning after a concert, I met an audience member purchasing the score of the Mozart sonata I had played the preceding evening.

(Now that purchasing a Mozart sonata means purchasing a CD of a Mozart sonata, I had to insert "the score of" to make clear that her intention was to play the sonata herself--to not let me have all the fun.)