Recently I played a program tailor-made for an audience of octogenarians, a program made up entirely of pieces we had all studied sixty years ago. They were stunned to hear this music taken seriously.

The point I stress is that they (read, we) as children were not taken seriously. That great music was assigned to us because it was supposedly easy to play. If you show me anyone who can play octave chords in both hands ppp (as in the Rachmaninoff C# minor Prelude) easily I will fall over. If you find anyone who claims they can play the scales in Mozart's C major Sonata K. 545 effortlessly I will find it hard to believe.

Our feelings about the music were not considered. The possibility that the music might have real content did not enter into discussion. Was I the only one who felt humiliated by feeling wretched about these assignments?

Memory and familiarity are both complex forces at work in our consciousness of music. Playing from memory is important in traditional pedagogy, though I find it not at all clear that it improves anyone's playing, except those whose memorization is so integrated with auditory concentration that it never becomes a distraction.

Distraction renders memory meaningless or maybe even harmful. All kinds of things can become distractions: A muscle spasm can destroy continuity. Children playing from memory become aware of a resonance they had not previously noticed -- this happens mostly when playing in recitals on grand pianos with the lid up after having practiced on upright, muted and probably out-of-tune. A sudden rush of rich sound can turn the piano into a veritable mad dog. How do you just keep going?

Familiarity, too, has its downside. Humming the opening of Beethoven's Fifth does not mean we get it.

Maybe it would be better to focus on getting our bearings independent of a framework that assumes mindlessness to be a good idea.

Yesterday I saw an old film featuring splendid harpsichord and organ playing by Gustav Leonhardt along with other fine period instrument players, in a rather badly strung-together film called The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (a total fiction--just an excuse for filming settings and various kinds of Bach compositions). The film was preluded, so to speak, by the theatre (a non-commercial artsy, film-buffs' hangout) playing a non-stop CD of the Well Tempered Clavier on a modern piano. I cringed in anticipation of the horrible impact of the first sounds on a harpsichord appropriately tuned, i.e., not in equal temperament. The whole point of that other tuning is how IN-tune it is. Relentlessly playing equally tempered recordings beforehand produced the opposite effect. By the end of the film one had adapted, of course; but the whole point was lost.

I play the modern piano. I love the sound of the modern piano. It is magical and wondrously open-ended.

I love also the sound of the harpsichord appropriately tuned in some version of mean-tone temperament, in which the major thirds are gentle and chromatic intervals full of character.

Each is, in its way, splendid. But they are not interchangeable.

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.