Unlike the other arts, music has no direct connection with the rest of the human world. True, there are bird songs and natural "melodies" in the gurgling of brooks, but these are hardly the materials of music in the way that landscape can be the subject of painting. And no natural sounds can stand alone as quasi-artworks the way that the deeply eroded limestone blocks from China's Lake Tai can be admired as great abstract sculptures. Music demands to be understood in its own terms. This is not a new requirement, for others have urged people to focus on music as experience that is intrinsically and only musical. Still, the false analogies are convenient: Music is emotion that is linguistically structured! The way out of this error is to understand music as experience. In this essay, the author discusses the following: (1) What music isn't; (2) What can teachers teach about it; and (3) How people should understand music. (Contains 7 notes.)