"Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace."

It was an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn . . . as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition - that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else.

Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.

Music . . .can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another . . . and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.