As if on schedule, a beautiful instance of singularity occurred at my piano yesterday afternoon. A young girl learning to read music with comprehension--that is with punctuation (articulation) and dynamics (tone of voice) inherent in the music rather than pasted onto neutral notes--played through a song in Bartok's For Children, Vol. I. To my surprise she preferred the "eerie," "peculiar," harmonization (her words) to the more conventional one.

Her reactions, her access to descriptive vocabulary, and her delight in the sense of connection to the piece--all of this represents tremendous progress toward experiencing mastery.

Too much music pedagogy has as its goal making the young learner feel the opposite.

I wonder how much that is based on the teacher's own removal from a directly passionate experience of music, which might lead to a belief that the only way to hold a child's attention is to bind them in slavish obedience to some incomprehensible standard.

Apologies for missing several days - sometimes things pile up in unexpected ways.

I am thinking a lot about singularity, particularly how out-of- sync it is with the prevailing wind approach to culture. That affects everything we buy, think, foster in our children and in each other -- everything.

What happened to it?

Why is it like sticking one's head into a guillotine to hatch an idea that doesn't conform to the accepted norms? I find myself in this odd position of having had a strong influence on the singular lives of quite a few individuals, some of them professional musicians, and yet with my approach singularly unvalued by music school administration.

Odd, isn't it?

A long talk with a retired art teacher drew out the observation that competitiveness is built into music study from the earliest levels while it is missing from art study.

She remarked that depth is apparent in children's artwork even at an early age. Very often parents do not discern it and opt to train the child's facility. The counterpart to me in piano study is the absence of ear-awareness/touch that goes with competitive piano playing. Don't the parents hear the hostility? It is the first thing I notice. I always wonder how long will that child's musical life will last.

I once had a young student who played like that after a bad day at school. I would change places with her and do some playing myself. A few minutes later she got the point: Music is a two-way street on which the listener is to be respected as much as the player.

Some people accuse me of doing music therapy. Music therapy assumes a norm of hearing and response to music. But I do the opposite in that I encourage each student to listen on their own terms and to develop the sense of mastery that comes with satisfying one's own ear.

Today the young woman who is a master dressmaker had trouble playing her Bartok piece fluidly. "I can do it at home," she said; "why not here?" The answer is analogous to making individual stitches in hand-sewing; she knows well how hard that is. It is much more difficult to recognize as "the same" a composition played on one's home piano and played on my beautiful grand.

I find it incredible that she expresses nuanced touch dealing with consonance and dissonance; that she is moved by the piece to extend it with her own material. I find her observations nothing short of masterful and they teach me a lot about the music and about my own hang-ups about playing the piano.

The list of pieces with dauntingly simple beginnings got a bit longer yesterday when I sat down to actually note their titles. Notable among them is a piece I do not dare play, to this day, certainly not in public and almost never in private.

Its opening is, to me, sheer anguish. It is the Mozart A minor Piano Sonata. Various recorded performances of its first ten bars or so were played at a recent conference as an example of how hard it can be to tell a real half-cadence from an elided phrase. By the time the sixth or seventh rendition was played everyone was laughing--everyone but me.

On paper it is utterly benign. Touching those sounds is like touching an open wound.

Closely related to boredom is simplicity. Beginning a work whose beginning is utter simplicity strikes me as extremely difficult; I have in the past refused to perform works whose openings are so exposed that I cannot bear to play them.

I can count the number of such works on one hand.

Such simplicity is associated with late works as tolerance for simplicity in a performer is a sign of maturity.

Simplicity implies questions "Why?" "Where does this come from?" "Why does this frighten me so deeply?"

I used to dislike playing one note unaccompanied by a chord. If you ask me now I would declare it to be the height of musical expression--even on the piano.

I think often of Henry Purcell's setting of "Music for a while shall all our cares beguile" in which the word "music" is sung on a single tone: G.

Today's topic is boredom. I know it well, having suffered from it for years and years. Yesterday I saw the makings of it in a young student and the opposite of it in a slightly older student.

The makings of boredom: When tone is crammed into rigid rhythmic units it loses its traction. It has no inherent reason for moving, whether up or down, or for repeating, or for not moving. Tension cannot exist when metronomic rhythm determines the next event. One young student needs desperately to be relieved of every sensation of tension. He is in a hurry to learn "how it goes" so that he can repeat it, fooling himself and others into believing that the music has been learned.

The slightly older student feels the imprint of tone in specific rhythmic contexts so intently that variation is almost painful to her. Incredible to me is the intensity of this phenomenon. Dealing with it requires substantive work.

As a young learner I more resembled the first case. Ultimately I distorted every detail of a composition: articulation, note values, and so on; in my rush to pretend I knew what I was doing I could only play fast and faster. Needless to say, I could not sustain interest in a composition until someone caught me at this little game and showed me what musical traction is.