Like many teachers, I have a rule for my students that before you make up your own bowings, you have to be able to do the ones on the page. Before you jam on the chords of a traditional tune, you have to learn it the way I’m playing it to you -- which is the way someone played it to me, or the way someone played it to someone who wrote it down once. Part of the reason I’m such a stickler is that I want to make sure the kids aren’t just sneaking around gaps in their skills. (Creativity has better uses than that.) But there’s more to my meticulousness than matters of technique. It’s also about paying due respect to the musicians who came before you.

I thought about this today when, driving around with the radio on, I heard President Obama say “Pakistan” in a way I’ve never heard another American politician say it. I don’t know if he got every single phoneme exactly the way anyone from the country itself would pronounce it, but clearly his intention was to show respect and awareness -- to show, in the most literal and simple way, that he was listening. Isn’t that the very first thing we want our politicians to do?

I realized how intensely meaningful it is to hear sounds in a human tradition, whether in music or in language, and to communicate those sounds back or pass them on to others. It occurred to me that when we teach kids to play, we’re really teaching them a whole attitude about how to listen, to others and to themselves, for the rest of their lives. I got it -- really got it, for the briefest moment -- that doing music really does change how we relate to the whole world. I’m trying to imagine what it might be like to teach every single lesson with the thought in mind of what kind of neighbors and citizens music can help my students become.