Monday, July 13, 1970.

Then he saw himself sitting at the old piano, striking chords softly from
its speckled keys . . .

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Frédéric Chopin, the nineteenth century Polish composer and

virtuoso pianist, “was acknowledged as having the ideal
personality of the Romantic artist, as he was introverted,
extremely sensitive, and had a tendency towards melancholy.”
His ability to escape to an internal world of evocative emotion
from which he drew musical inspiration created a buffer between
him and the vulgarity of life.

When I was sixteen years old I landed my first summer job at The
Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. At lunchtime on the first day I
stopped off at the main branch of the Philadelphia Library on the
Benjamin Franklin Parkway, just a few blocks north of the
Institute. I borrowed the complete Chopin waltzes. When I
returned to the office I spent the remainder of my break perusing
the score, imagining myself at the piano. Lost in thought and
mindless of the passage of time, my supervisor felt compelled to
arrest my reverie. “Gary, it’s time to get back to work!”