For time not only moves inexorable forward, as the underlying grid to our personal chronicle, but is manipulated by our psychic needs and natures into various images of timelessness and timeliness. Transient moments suddenly expand, visions of infinity intervene, notes and phrases become outlets of fantasy, escape, recollection, or omen. The music travels on two planes, chronological time and psychological time. Both planes are essential and must be abundantly represented.

The context for music is varied and profound. If their fantasy is to be awakened-so that their sounds may be incisive or ravishing-then the menagerie of saints and dragons must be faithfully recalled.

Through music time is tamed, although music never forgets to remind us of time's faceless mission.

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

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.

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 know the piano is to know the universe. To master the piano is to master the universe. The spectrum of piano sound acts as a prism through which all musical and non-musical sounds may be filtered. The grunts of sheep, the braying of mules, the popping of champagne corks, the sighs of unrequited love, not to mention the full lexicon of sounds available to all other instruments-including whistles, scrapes, bleatings, caresses, thuds, hoots, plus sweet and sour pluckings-fall within the sovereignty of this most bare and dissembling chameleon.