I was six when the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto got into me, the old Heifetz recording, and I have never heard it the same way since. I was a kid at a piano, years away from being able to explain a single thing about why it moved me. It went in anyway, before I had any of the words, and it stayed.
There may be no clearer example of the brain being physically reshaped by experience than learning an instrument. Musicians show measurable differences in the regions that handle sound, the regions that handle movement, and the bridge that carries signal between the two halves of the brain. Practice doesn't just build skill. It rewires the hardware. And the earlier you start, the deeper the changes seem to run, because a young brain is still deciding what to become.
But the part that interests me most isn't the wiring. It's the timing.
The pieces that arrive before you have any theory, any vocabulary, any sense of what is supposed to be good, those pieces don't get stored as opinions. You weren't capable of an opinion yet. They get stored as templates. The rest of your taste then forms around them, quietly, for the rest of your life. You spend decades measuring new music against standards you set before you could read.
This is why I don't trust the idea that loving the technical side of music is somehow cold. When I argue a piece is great for what it demands, the precision, the impossible thing made to sound inevitable, I'm not stepping away from the feeling. The precision is the feeling. The technical mastery is the vehicle, not the alternative to it. I learned that at six, sitting at a piano, long before I could have said it in a sentence.
That's the strange gift of early music. An instrument doesn't only teach you to play. It changes what you are able to hear, and it does it while you are too young to know it's happening. The pieces from that age become the measure for everything that comes after, and you carry the measuring stick whether you remember picking it up or not.
So here is the question I keep coming back to. What did you hear too young to understand, that you have never gotten over? That piece isn't your favorite. It's closer to the foundation the rest got built on.