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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.