Last week my sixteen-year-old piano student, who doesn't "practice" but who plays a lot, wondered why Clementi's Preludes in A minor are so short when they are so beautiful.

Today she wondered why Mozart wrote only one piano sonata in that key, and whether Beethoven had written any. Fascinating question. (There are two sonatas for piano and violin but none for piano solo.) I sang for her what I consider to be the quintessential A minor piece: Der Leiermann from Schubert's Winterreise.

She told me she had been playing Chopin's A minor Prelude and played it for me, with some wrong notes, to be sure, but with such right sound that I was awed. Clearly she has a deep feeling for the sonorities of A minor, even though the tonality is only obliquely present in that piece. It is one of the most sophisticated pieces of music I know.

We had a talk about private vs. public piano playing. She is clearly a private player. If she wanted to play that piece for people she would have to get some experience doing so by inviting people -- any people -- to sit and listen to her. It is a personal choice, after all.

I recall at her age not being able to tolerate the mystery of that piece.

Yesterday a small group of amateur singers sight-read a Mozart four-part canon V'amo di core, which I had never sung before, though it has called out to me for many years. It turns out to be all about tenderness. And so it is, every note. The point is made right away with the first deviation from the obviously tunable notes of the tonic triad. He makes them risky in the most beautiful way.

I woke up this morning realizing how easily such fragile music gets destroyed by banging out the right notes on the piano rather than allowing (encouraging!) singers to puzzle out the emotional distances between pitches. It makes all the difference in the world.

Do you remember how demeaning it felt when you first realized that the over-simplifications you learned as a child did not help but only hindered comprehension?

We hear the effects of such oversimplifications every day of the week in a music school where bar lines are more apparent than anything else.

There is no reason in the world why children can't learn rhythm as the endlessly variable phenomenon that it is, except that deep-down parents want their children to replicate their own bad experiences. If you have a better explanation please let me know.

I have been thinking all day about how different music seems when the point is to get it, rather than to get all the notes right but miss the point entirely.

Too often the meaning has to be supplied by theoretical analysis then pasted onto the music via some intellectual process that has very little to do with actual listening.

There is no doubt: sound comes first. The young duo sightread Rachmaninoff's Barcarolle this morning. Immediately it sounded wonderful, even when there were rhythmic meanderings between them. They were listening, that was the secret. Without knowing the piece they already had discerned its scenario, without any help from me.

I could not have done that at their age because my reading was vision-based, not ear-based.

I find that when I listen without a score I hear the music more accurately. When I read the score I pre-judge what I am going to hear and miss the instrumental subtleties that distinguish this particular version of the G triad from all others the world has ever heard.

Read this way a Beethoven sonata comes to life from within--right away.

This kind of learning, which admittedly takes longer, also lasts longer, both in terms of sustained concentration while playing and in terms of integrated fascination with the work.

Think about the difference between a public and a private instrument. Are all pianos public? One would think they were judging from the way children are encouraged to think about them--or rather, are encouraged to treat them. Because from what I observe, the child's thinking about the piano rarely enters into the picture.

The thought part is more closely bound up with the tonal imagination--with sound itself rather than with proper execution or interpretation.

The thought part is harder to define, harder to train, yet more lasting in its impact and more central to the real power of music.

Yesterday I heard an eminent theorist/musicologist present two versions of a Beethoven Sonata for Piano and Cello, Op. 69. It was a fascinating presentation which featured performances of both versions of the piece by a highly competent student duo. I had to leave before the conclusion of the presentation, but heard enough to realize that the scholar, himself a cellist who has played the piece many times, got it backwards: It is an accompanied sonata, but it is the cello that is accompanying the piano, not the other way around. The duo who played definitely had been advised to keep the cello on top, so to speak, and the piano took a receding role. This is entirely wrong as it skirts all the critical issues raised by the composition: why it contrasts A major, a fine cello key, with F# minor, a lousy cello key but a fascinating piano key.

The piano was a knockout invention. Its sound, then as now, is unfathomably rich, particularly in the black key department. Beethoven was totally fascinated with the sound of black keys in contrast to white. How do I know? Look at the key signatures of Op. 2: No. 1-- four flats; No. 2 -- three sharps; No. 3 -- none of either. This pattern repeats throughout his life. Can it be accidental, then, that he regards this as subject matter?