Surely common sense as well as anthropological evidence documents the universal need to pray, to hope, and to lament or carouse through song.

Art is a process of concentration. It is both the distilled essence and the commentary upon otherwise mundane activities and reflections. Musical notes must be charged, must gather more than one and the surface meaning, must reveal audible and "inaudible" connections to other notes, patterns, and meaning, either by way of affinity or contrast.

Surely common sense as well as anthropological evidence documents the universal need to pray, to hope, and to lament or carouse through song.

When we play music we describe the echo the tableau of natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by the composer's imagination, which yet must be filtered through our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this tableau, this revelation, we must "hesitate", we must doubt, as the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the construction of being.

The music of the supreme architect, Bach, is filled with pages of discursive argument and rumination, glorifying the nameless whole by a rich embroidery of passages which lead everywhere and nowhere. The ideas are presented, stood on their head, dissolved into fragments, until the ultimate message becomes the connections of all things great and small, a chain of being which cannot be secured until the last note is in place.

The work of art, though bound by its genetic markings and indelible fingerprints, is boundless in the infinite elaborations of its destiny, and therefore in the range of its interpretations.

To master the piano is to master the universe.