For the last few days I’ve been transfixed by the videos of precocious young children playing piano music by Mozart, Haydn, Chopin, Debussy, etc, on YouTube. There are always comments under these videos remarking that the child in question is too young to understand such music, that there is a lack of expression, etc. But it seems to me that these young children do indeed understand the music and that there is hardly ever a lack of appropriate expression.It strikes me that music speaks to human beings in a mysterious way. I don’t think these children are any more emotionally mature than other children – I just think that music speaks to human beings on an intuitive level but by way of mechanisms that  we don’t understand. Just as children may be precocious in the maths so too they may be precocious in music. These children can do things with music that it takes the rest of us many years to achieve but this must be because music is essentially to do with the way we are as human beings. Human beings create music but it is created within a language that speaks to other human beings regardless of age.