Few things are more revealing than a Beethoven Sonata in the hands of a teenage student: I see in her comprehension-motivated reading the exact opposite of my reading at her age (16), the goal of which was to play it as painlessly as possible.

This morning I discovered that one movement that has always felt weird to me need not feel weird at all: it begins with an upbeat bar while I had always heard it as a downbeat bar which, of course, throws the entire movement off balance. She got it; I did not.

A real dilemma faces educators now more than ever: Do we train children to answer or to ask questions? If to answer, then we assume that the questions we are asking are relevant to our children. If to ask, we assume that we are all living in a changing world and that the teacher generation has no idea what the questions of their era will be.

Those who favor answers are currently setting the tone of public education in this country.

I favor questions.

One of my students has the ear of a composer. When he doesn't approve of the note choices of a composer whose work he is reading he changes the notes without thinking about it.

As he is a visual arts student I asked if he had ever copied a painting. Yes. Well, every time you play this piece you are copying the composition; your errors are not acceptable if the job is to copy the work as it is, not as you would prefer it to be. Playing a piece on the piano can seem like a repetitive activity unless approached with a fully awakened sense of responsibility.

An eminent scholar referred in a study on Mozart to the way amateurs massacre certain of his works. I don't think it's their fault. I blame the instrument teachers who cannot distinguish between music that is technically easy to play and music that is profoundly transparent. I am thinking of those "easy" Mozart sonatas and of Schumann's Fantasy Pieces--given routinely to intermediate level clarinetists and cellists, though they are among the most sophisticated ensemble duo that exist. Once you give people a taste of incompetence for which they receive praise the ship is already sinking.

One day many years ago I proposed teaching my daughter to read music; she was about eight at the time. It made sense as I was teaching singing in her school and she was very much enjoying that.

She shrugged and shook her head.

Now, many years later, she still does not read notation. Yet her musical mind works so much faster than the minds of others who do read that she gets hired for demanding gigs playing new jazz composed by some very fine musicians.

The music that most fascinates me would have been lost forever had it not been written down. My goal in teaching others to read it is to get below the level of the notation to where the sound was as alive to the composer as it is to the mind of a creative musician alive today.

I have developed a way of teaching reading that can achieve this--it doesn't work for every child, but it does work for most children that I have taught. By not tying the notes first to motor responses the child can relate them first to an auditory equivalent, then to a motor response. (Motor responses may constitute difficult or even dangerous territory for some learners.) Taught the other way music becomes mechanical, repetitive--you know the drill.

It's amazing that the printed score is now so accepted as the music that I can't get through to an experienced player that musical logic precedes what is on the page. Meaning is not in the print in music any more than in poetry or prose. There is nothing scared about what is in a book or on a blog.

Trying to work on the mammoth problem of rhythm control with a teenager it becomes clear that one cannot arrive at rhythmic control without considering tonal action. In a Beethoven sonata, for example, the many layers of tonal activity so directly affect awareness of the beat that the two are inextricably intertwined. Don't even try to treat one apart from the other: death will surely ensue--either the player's, from boredom, or Beethoven's from assault.

I liken the problem to the heart monitor at the hospital bedside, happily purring away at a steady rate until a bell rings. The thing goes wild. Are you going to believe that all that activity occurs within the same time unit as the quiet, predictable purring?