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 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.

To master the piano is to master the universe.

The contradictory, consuming, contested relationship between detail and whole, event an eventuality, breathes fire and wisdom in every great work of art.

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.

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

A work of art expresses itself as a balance sheet pitting the spoken against the unspoken.