I've had this discussion so many times before I can hardly count them. And it's the same every time. This is something people really get fired up over. I even had it last night with my aunt who is a classical pianist and agrees mostly with everything DMK says about jazz being much more difficult than classical piano. Anyway, here is what I think. Believe it or not music cannot be written down. We could devise a machine to read it and play it but it wouldn't be music. Music must be a communication directly from one person to another. A human being creates music. A machine just creates sound. A recording is merely a facsimile of music just the way a photographic image is a facsimile of an object. No matter how perfect it is, it is NOT the object. The problem is that there is much more to music than merely the notes. Ever notice that Europeans cannot play jazz. Well that many no longer be universally true but it wasn't until recently that any of them could. "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got dat swing." (I never said I didn't like jazz or that I don't enjoy listening to it.) But most European musicians learned music from strict taskmasters. They play what's on the musical page or they get their knuckles rapped with the back of a ruler. It's up to the musician to bring music to life, to add something of himself to it to make it human. It means that nothing about it can be exactly what is written. An extreme example is in jazz. If there's one kind of music that defies being written down using the kind of notation we've had for the last 3 or 4 hundred years it's jazz. You can't write down a blue note. It fits between the other notes somewhere. You can't exactly write jazz syncopated rhythms. They don't quite fit the notation either. Even in classical music, there are interpretations which take license with tempo, dynamics, tone, and other aspects which defy the written notation too. Playing music is like singing. It come from the heart, not from a piece of paper. And if the musician cannot bring part of himself to put some of his own soul and emotion into it, it isn't very good music. But that's what we have here. Someone who simply played the notes as they were written. No more, no less. Just like a machine. Real music may slow down or speed up in some places. The dynamics may vary from what's written. The musician puts his own stamp on it. His inflections, phrasing, interpretations express the way he sees the world and what he brings is his imprint of his own personality and experience onto the performance. Even his excitment inspired by the enthusiasm of a live audience can alter his performance. Or the sadness of a recent terrible loss. Without any of this, we have a mere technician and that is not what music or any art is about.