"You can't teach sound." Wise words from a fifteen-year-old. How can anyone convince an intelligent child that a piece of music is the same on one piano as on another? It isn't. Nothing about it is "the same" except perhaps a theoretical scheme that abstracts from the sound a kind of logical procedure with identifiable elements.

But that isn't the music.

No instrument begs the question as much as the piano, for there is no such thing as "the" piano. Maybe that's why piano instruction is so regimented as to deny the very nature of each instrument we play and why musicians who play sonatas "For Piano and ..." fail to listen to the particular piano with which they play.

Ever since there has been a musical culture in Europe composers have incorporated sounds of everyday life into their works. I was fortunate to have lived in Europe before the postwar change of life-style to include automobiles and superhighways. I heard lots of things that are no longer part of the daily street scene, like bells--many, many bells. Also heavy hammering, a couple of drunks harmonizing maudlin melodies in the middle of the night, workmen singing as they made a wall--things that are pretty much gone. It is fun to imagine what kind of persistent, repetitive noise Mozart might have been recalling when he wrote those repeated, rather puzzling chords.

Yesterday a young student was sight-reading Mozart's Sonata in G, K. 283, the last movement. In it Mozart repeats a chord four times--an unusual chord, not particularly pleasant, but definitely conspicuous. Laughing, the student said it sounded like a car horn.

That could not have been the sound Mozart had in mind; but surely he had something just as specific in mind--most likely a noise from everyday 18th-century life.

It is hard to imagine what it might have been, but one thing is clear: we live in an extremely noisy environment. In the few moments between the end of the preceding paragraph and the beginning of this one I was aware of many pitched sounds: the beeping of a bus backing up, a humming motor under my desk, a droning airplane flying past, plus two noisy thumpings: the heat in the pipes and my building's elevator.

Is it far-fetched to imagine that composers sometimes write so as to make us more aware of listening?

I sometimes perform a very well-known piece for an audience of strangers. I particularly relish making such music come newly alive, especially as I have all my life had zero tolerance for hearing the exact same thing more than once.

It was interesting, then, to play the first movement of the "Moonlight" Sonata. Believing the fantasy aspect of the work to lie in its extraordinary tone/overtone mixes I play it fairly straight--in other words, I let the composition and the piano do the work. It was clear that the audience was listening on two levels: hearing the music as they knew it already and hearing this fresh reading.

Many years ago I played "Fuer Elise" for a 7th-grade class, who were then supposed to write reviews of the performance. I was severely taken to task by one girl because I did not do the dramatic crescendos indicated in her edition. Her teacher would never have allowed her to exercise the restraint specified by Beethoven in the Urtext edition. The girl was fascinated to see the difference and I remain fascinated by how much she cared.

Why are we so reluctant to grant a sense of humor to Mozart? We find so much that's shocking in his letters. Is it possible that that same quality is suddenly lacking in his music?

In a way one learns more about the spirit of Mozart from Chico Marx than from current concert behavior. His irreverence is brilliant and sadly almost unknown to the younger generation.

Today I was studying a Mozart piano concerto in the light of the orchestral voicing, particularly the French horn part. I came across a most unlikely harmony in which the horns, playing in octaves, play the tonic tone, which throws the whole exotic harmony out of balance. In all the performances of this piece I have ever heard that imbalance was never allowed to dominate the moment. If I were to conduct you may be sure it would!

Such things are always a matter of personal taste. But taste has to be backed up with a sense of the composer's skill in writing down exactly what he had in mind, whether or not it meets contemporary standards of good taste.

If exuberance and drunkenness release us from inhibitions, they release us also from hangups about technical perfection. Perhaps that's why some of the most difficult passages in music must have been conceived as expressions of these extreme states of mind and body.

I have suggested as much to players faced with these challenges only to be answered with a dull stare, as if to say, "You must be kidding." But what if Schumann is kidding? Or Schubert? or Brahms?