(from a friend) Mahler, Bruckner, Sibelius, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff—they all made more daring, trippier work as they got older. I would love to hear Bruckner’s 13th Symphony, or his 25th. The thought of spending a day or a week or a month inside a simulation of his process, feeling an intelligence modeled on the arc of his work, watching melodies and counterpoint and orchestration and recapitulation fall into place, mapping his references and allusions—and influencing that process, working as a co-author with him, infusing some late-Romantic earworms of my own—that might be the most pleasurable creative experience I can imagine. A teacher, is what we’re talking about. A teacher with endless understanding and all the time in the world, who knows your brain down to the synapse. Anyone who wanted to could get a dozen times smarter without even tweaking their biology.
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