The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed.

The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed.

I believe that the only excuse we have for being musicians and for making music in any fashion, is to make it differently, to perform it differently, to establish the music's difference, vis-a-vis our own difference.

The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can’t think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that — its humanity.

My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky.

Once I turned pro, so to speak, I put away childish things forever.