The Chopin Preludes are so specifically about tonality on the piano I find it difficult to follow the popular notion that they were inspired by the Preludes in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. They share so many attributes with the preludes in Clementi's Preludes and Exercises: the sequence of keys, comprising all the major and minor keys; the specifics of hand position and shifts in relation to black and white keys; the effect on sustained notes of a running figure in the other hand.

A certain society of loyalists recall every year in a memorial notice in The New York Times that Richard III was framed, that he was, in fact, not the ogre Shakespeare makes him out to be. Following their example I am tempted to place a memorial notice to the effect that Clementi was not, as Mozart characterized him, a mechanicus, despite the fact that generations of piano teachers have chosen to believe Mozart rather than listen objectively to Clementi's remarkable music.

Take a moment to consider your definition of music. We had all better do so quick before the search engines of the universe decide permanently that music is CDs or MP3 downloads. The best cure for that is to keep our definitions experiential. That is readily done by exercising as many kinds of listening as our world provides, which feels to me like an infinite number.

Engage in the proposition that all listening has a musical component, whether intended or not. Try to avoid limiting your notion of music to a construct that depends for its validity on right and wrong notes.

Buy a small bell or finger cymbals. I find that just looking at such things arouses awareness of sound in the broader dimension.

All day yesterday and most of today I have been thinking about the centrality of sharing music with others. I know of too many families in which music has become the dividing line between those who "can" and those who "can't." There are so many ways to participate mutually in music without skill being an issue.

The best way is to start young, as with everything else. But that means that parents would have to accept the possibility that they could relax and enjoy some playful noise making, not necessarily with pitched instruments, not necessarily with right notes or wrong notes. For many people this seems like a bad idea. But it's not.

When my children were young we had a daily routine. No matter what anyone's mood or disposition we all joined in to play games with songs. We clinked on water glasses and sang. We rang little bells and drummed on drums. It was always a time of letting everyone's hair down and simply enjoying sound together. Was it music? It must have been. Those little bells and water-glass-type sound effects are central to my daughter's compositions. And not just hers: I hear them frequently in the works of other avant-garde musical creators.

The time to start is now.

Life is full of surprises. My latest is that my email box is not overflowing with protests about consonant triads going out of style. I simply don't believe the readers of this blog are going to let that pass without protest or at least argument.

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.