To play the piano is to consort with nature. Every mollusk, galaxy, vapor or viper as well the sweet incense of love's distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist.

The breath, prayers, and libido of the fingertip must somehow be transferred to the neutral indifference of the key.

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.

Without silence there is no music. Not simply because the faculty of hearing deteriorates from constant exposure to noise, but because silence is both the majestic frame and the stable solution for musical (and poetic) ideas. Silence is the soda water, the bracing ether, the bridge and mode of respect for receiving instructions from the angel.

As Bartok put it so succinctly: "Competitions are for horses." Nothing could be more barbaric that the practice or ranking artists as though they were divers or figure skaters....What one suspects is that the appetite for dividing the world into winners and losers, anointed and anonymous, is so compulsive that it feeds with special, vindictive hunger on the most elusive and ephemeral of subjects. For if music can be reduced to games of power and success, then innocence-love without profit-can be dealt a crushing blow.

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.

To play the piano is to consort with nature. Every mollusk, galaxy, vapor or viper as well the sweet incense of love's distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist.