As I hear my student playing the piano through Zoom, just for a moment, I think I am hearing Paderewski in 1912. The sound is imperfect. At moments it drops out. There are distortions of speed and rhythm. Yet, my ear, my mind is hearing music: completing and linking together the aural information that is there.   As an adolescent, and thanks to the public library, I listened to a lot of recordings made by pianists of the early 20th … [Read more...]