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I recount this rather gloomy anecdote because it stands for a thousand experiences in life, involving what, for lack of a better word, we call “chemistry” between people. There just is no chemistry between Bartók and me. I respect his intelligence, his creative drive, and his high moral standards, but I have no idea what made his heart tick. Not a clue. But I could say this of thousands of people — and then there are those for whom the reverse holds equally strongly. For instance, there is no piece of music in the world that means more to me than Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, written within just a few years of the Bartók concerto. (In fact, to my bewilderment, I have even seen the two mentioned in the same breath, as if they were cut from the same cloth. They might have some superficial textures in common here and there, but to me they are as different as Bach and Eminem.) While the Bartók rolls off of me like water off a duck’s back, the Prokofiev flows into me like an infinitely intoxicating elixir. It speaks to me, soars inside me, sets me on fire, turns up the volume of life to full blast.

I need not go on and on, because I am sure that every reader has experienced chemistries and non-chemistries of this sort — perhaps even relating to the Bartók and Prokofiev violin concertos in exactly the reverse fashion from me, but even so, the message I am trying to convey will come across loud and clear. Music seems to me to be a direct route to the heart, or between hearts — in fact, the most direct. Across-the-board alignment of musical tastes, including both loves and hates — something extremely rarely run into — is as sure a guide to affinity of souls as I have ever found. And an affinity of souls means that the people concerned can rapidly come to know each other’s essences, have great potential to live inside each other.

Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites

As children, as adolescents, and even as adults, we are all copycats. We involuntarily and automatically incorporate into our repertoire all sorts of behavior-fragments of other people. I already mentioned my “Hopalong Cassidy smile” in first grade, which I suppose still vaguely informs my “real” smile, and I have dozens of explicit memories of other copycat actions from that age and later. I remember admiring and then copying one friend’s uneven, jagged handwriting, a jaunty classmate’s cool style of blustering, an older boy’s swaggering walk, the way the French ticketseller in the film Around the World in Eighty Days pronounced the word américain, a college friend’s habit of always saying the name of his interlocutor at the end of every phone call, and so forth. And when I watch a video of myself, I am always caught off guard to see so many of my sister Laura’s terribly familiar expressions (they’re so her) flicker briefly across my face. Which of us borrowed from the other, and when, and why? I’ll never know.

I have long watched my two children imitate catchy intonation-patterns and favorite phrases of their American friends, and I can also hear specific Italian friends’ sounds and phrases echo throughout their Italian. There have been times when, on listening to either of them talk, I could practically have rattled off a list of their friends’ names as the words and sounds sailed by.

The small piano pieces I used to compose with such intense emotional fervor — a fervor that felt like it was pure me — are riddled, ironically, with recognizable features coming very clearly from Chopin, Bach, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Scriabin, Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, Poulenc, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Kern, and easily another dozen or more composers whose music I listened to endlessly in those years. My writing style bears marks of countless writers who used words in amazing ways that I wished I could imitate. My ideas come from my mother, my father, my youthful friends, my teachers… Everything I do is some