Can music be taught to children in the light of a rapidly changing cultural climate? In order to do so teachers would themselves have to participate in change.

Consonant triads went out of style the day the piano was invented and the music pedagogy establishment has been trying desperately to deny this reality ever since -- that's over 200 years ago.

The fully-occupied, sensitive and intelligent 16-year-old getting acquainted with the Chopin G major Prelude puzzles out the fingering and the nuances in the different tonalities and their varying configurations of black and white keys. She hears that she cannot play the figure exactly the same way twice. I encourage her to keep noticing the differences and to relish them because it means that her fingers are inflecting the way a good actor inflects his or her lines: never mechanically repeating them but allowing all sorts of unforeseeable things to affect their timing and internal stress.

To me this is mature piano playing. It is fascinating. Better than perfect.

The young singer's difficulty with theory class and the Chopin Preludes are not unrelated. I was first assigned the Preludes as a teenager. I recall bafflement: what was the relationship between No. 2 and the key of A minor, or No. 4 and E minor? Already a kind of theoretical rigor mortis seemed to have set in.

Played sequentially the Preludes make clear that Chopin hears tonality on the piano as a function of the variability of fundamentals and overtones: why can't a tonic tone by present as an overtone before it is explicitly a fundamental? Overtone interaction is much more in evidence if the pieces are played sequentially than if played out of context.

Confusing overtones with fundamentals is the most common problem I have encountered with people having trouble adjusting to theory and ear-training. That finding is corroborated by people who run ear-training programs. I deal with the phenomenon as it affects either individuals wanting to feel good about playing the piano or people singing or playing in small groups.

As if to demonstrate the point of yesterday's post, today I heard of a young singer having trouble in music theory class. It is a story by now so familiar that it surprises whenever it comes up that anyone is surprised by it.

The voice resonates so entirely differently from instruments outside the body that the very definition of pitch is called into question every time the singer opens her mouth. Of course, instrumentalists view this as a sign of the mental inferiority of singers. If anything, this attitude indicates a lack of understanding on the part of the instrumentalist, who is probably either a pianist or a theory teacher. Any musician who works with singers on a daily basis knows how changeable an instrument the voice is and must be. Therein lies its power.

Isn't it time to change our notions about pitch to include resonance? Music becomes much more interesting as a result, and musicians much easier to get along with.

The more I have to do with singing -- and I have more and more to do with it as my life progresses -- the clearer it is to me that the human voice precedes every instrumental sound, at least until the early 20th century moment when the voice became an instrument in the Sprechstimme which more prefigures electronic sound than develops the sound of the human voice.

The imposition of instrumental tone logic upon singers has been a destructive trend in their training: most singers recall ear-training and sight-singing with justifiable horror as these disciplines were piano-based, not voice-based.

I have found that only the most sophisticated instrumentalists have a clue how to deal with text, much less with an actual human voice singing a text.

After many weeks working through Clementi's Preludes and Exercises with a young student - a brilliant exploration of the particular intonations of the different keys on the piano, as well as of expressive hand positions, I took another look at Chopin's Preludes.

All that talk of Chopin thinking of Bach when he composed them: I have never understood it. I now believe he was thinking of Clementi.

Clementi is a composer who has been sorely misunderstood by generations of piano teachers after having been sorely resented (apparently) by Mozart who, unfortunately, put his disdain into writing to be smugly quoted ad infinitum. There is no competition between the two, to be sure. But Clementi was an immensely insightful composer whose witty explorations of the new instrument offer a lot to ponder.

Now that instruments have stopped "talking" music theorists are desperately trying to put language back into music. I have heard many papers on erudite aspects of how music relates to linguistics, involving analyses of metric structures and melodic lines, for example, in relation to syllables and spoken phrase inflection.

But instruments used to talk! Abstruse argument was not required to get the drift.

In the same way that every voice has its own registral colorations and that vocal tuning is a matter of overtones vs. linear tension, so, too, instruments like the natural horn inflected pitches relative to one another by virtue of their diverse coloration--it was all part of the act, not something added on by some intellectual process.

You cannot tell me that among the first things composers noticed about the fortepiano was that the black keys and the white keys in juxtaposition produced differently inflected tone qualities. There was no other keyboard instrument that did so. And it happened all by itself, simply as a matter of instrumental mechanics.

And then piano teachers got the idea that all the notes should sound the same: Equal strength in all the fingers, equal strength in every successive tone of every scale. And then the theorists got busy trying to put language-referenced inflection back into music.