This in itself constitutes a paradox: If you can choose to play anything, with equal probability, what could make you choose any one thing—on the spur of the moment, blindly, trusting, without thinking about it—except chance? In other words, how can the spontaneous be anything but random; how can music made in a jolt of instinct, on a bolt out of the now, be endowed with a form that makes sense in time, as though it had been written and rewritten and practiced and memorized beforehand? And how, in making that first, most instinctive, most desperate decision, do we choose—if it really can be
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