I was about to loan a CD to Judy- 
I transfer them back and forth 
by way of her husband, Dick-
when it struck me that the headline, 
MOZART, was immediately diminished 
by being one aspect only of that 
human being-The Complete Piano Sonatas. 
But even there it was just Volume 1 
KV. 282, 283, 309, 310 & 545 
out of hundreds of things he composed 
and that had been interpreted by another 
person, Philippe Entremont.

I can't explain it, but I remembered 
a quote from the biologist, Lewis 
Thomas, whose paragraph-poems 
are as good as Marianne Moore's. 
He was talking about possible life 
in another solar system-I would vote 
for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out 
into space, over and over again. 
We would be bragging, of course, 
but.it is surely excusable for us 
to put the best possible face on 
at the beginning of such an acquaintance.

Then I realized, that even with Thomas' 
neighborly tone of voice, how far
I had gotten away from Mozart, 
who prosaically had lived and written 
everyday. Not only was he in contention 
with Bach, but music in general 
was being projected imaginatively 
beyond any human connectedness. 
You see, by that time, I had loaned Judy 
another CD, and had turned MOZART 
over on its back and discovered 
this signature passage displayed-

This is the world's first transoceanic 
recording. It was made with the artist 
in Europe and the recording engineers 
in America utilizing the Bosendorfer 
SE reproducing piano system. Mr. 
Entremont's playing of the sonatas 
were recorded by computer in Vienna, 
Austria. Another computer then played 
the Bosendorfer Imperial Grand piano 
in Atlanta, Georgia, where it was 
recorded by ProArte's engineers.

They seemed to be playing rather loosely 
with the word played. And surely calling 
a computer an Imperial Grand is a long 
way from Mozart. What began with him 
had ended up with engineers-despite 
their calling themselves Pro ... Arts. 
And is were the proper verb?

Anyway, believe it or not, that night 
as I was rereading Morson and Emerson's 
book on Bakhtin, I saw another way 
to view those words. So I decided artificially 
to limit myself to a single utterance-

This potential is realized-as it is 
in the case of genres, great works, 
or whole cultures-by interaction 
with other languages and other belief 
complexes. Anyway, that's how my mind works.