I have been listening this week to the recorded piano music of a composer now widely esteemed for his ability to stay an hour or so ahead of his time. But I find the alternation of note-clumps and silences of which it consists impossibly monotonous, and I long for the leverage of Beethoven’s timing, to say nothing of harmonic and other leverages. The matter of the music is so limited in effect, too, and so solemn, that I was sustained only by the hope, during each longer silence, that finally the pianist might have ‘had it’ too and shot himself.