Whatever the connection is, I've discovered myself, lately, playing a similar game with both people and works of art. The people version can be played anywhere you are presented with brief glimpses of complete strangers, and consists of identifying a single tiny peculiarity about each person, and then constructing an elaborate extrapolation from it contending that that person either is, or isn't, your cosmically intended soul-mate. Most of the time it's easier to spot disqualifying details, but the game is more intriguing if you try to see the things that you might, forty years later, claim you fell in love with the moment you saw them: the way a person's gaze skims knowingly across the display windows as they walk past a bookstore; the way another one pauses at a crosswalk, as if muttering to themselves their part of an invisible dialog with the oncoming traffic; a choice of shoes; an indicative impatience or a simple smile. The advanced version of the game, once you've grown proficient at making fanciful snap judgments about people you don't know, is imagining that other people are playing it, too, watching you. How can your most mundane, circumscribed actions convey something of your personality and soul? How will you cross a street, or look in a window, or surreptitiously peruse the "adult" video section in such a way that a passerby could imagine, in your smallest gesture, a life the two of you might share?

The version of the game that involves art is, structurally, only minorly different. I suppose you could play it with movie trailers, radio singles and book-jacket blurbs, to be strictly parallel, but these are explicitly contrived, in the way that people simply going about their business are not, and so leave you less latitude for embellishment. I prefer, instead, to isolate the details myself, to pick out tiny splinters of meaning and imagine the alternate work in which these fleeting insights were integral. So, for example, in the film The Ice Storm, which I'm sure is about something else (though I'm not sure exactly what), I cling to two images: the severe modernist geometry of the neighbors' house, and the old-fashioned metal ice-tray out of which ice cubes are messily extracted for the endless parade of drinks. The house, to me, with its glass facades, fishbowl skylights and alien-kitch Seventies furniture, is the lead character in a sad architectural allegory about humanity's delusionary belief in independence through artifice. To build houses like that, you must believe that history is entirely arbitrary; that we do not learn from it, we are co-opted; and that new worlds, in fact, can be initiated at any moment you summon the resolve. It is possible to immerse yourself in this myth, momentarily, just as the house's occupants, in the film, clatter through it in a valiant attempt to impersonate the invincible, emotionless creatures that would feel at home in such spaces, but then a flood of other houses from other films rushes in, big, warm, imponderable structures sustained as much by tradition as by beams and bricks, from Love! Valour! Compassion!, Peter's Friends, The Myth of Fingerprints, A Thousand Acres, and reminds me of the immeasurable weight of precedent, and how many ways leverage can turn that weight from encumbrance into power. The ice-tray, on the other hand, is to me a chapter from another fable of machines and meaning, this one a nostalgic yearning for problems that can be solved within known constraints. The metal ice tray, with its clashing blades and handle that responded brightly to a satisfying smash, was a quintessentially Newtonian device, a product of a culture of graph paper, mechanical diagrams and decisive force vectors. It was a device that sang the biography of the cubes as you extracted them, bridging the conceptual gap between the water you poured in and the jagged shards of ice you took out with a story of transformation and organized destruction. Metal ice trays are gone, now, and with them a way of thinking and an expectation of continuity. Ice cubes now tumble out of automatic ice-makers, gifts for which we are beholden to our electric captors, or else they are flexed atomically out of plastic trays, taking deliberate advantage of the plastic's insubstantiality. Metal ice-trays were a recognizable evolution of glaciers and chisels, tiny machines that you could learn from, or repair; ice-makers and plastic trays are achievements that do not recapitulate their history, that do not teach, that break irreparably. They are tools that isolate us from who we are. As a method of making ice cubes they are, of course, vastly superior, but this efficiency comes at an enormous cultural cost. This is, in a way, that same dilemma that the film's sexual promiscuity finds itself entangled in, so perhaps, after all, I've understood more of it than I originally thought.

The detail I identify with, in this way, in Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet's recording of Tan Dun's Ghost Opera, is the use of ordinary substances -- water, stones, paper, metal -- as percussion. At some extremely impressionable point in my life I saw, on what must have been PBS, a video piece in which the percussionist David Van Tieghem, known then to me only for having appeared on Laurie Anderson's Big Science, wandered around an inexplicably deserted Manhattan, improvising an extended, self-propelled drum solo by beating on everything in sight. Later, at college, I tried to cultivate this practice, roaming around Harvard Yard late at night with drumsticks in hand, dashing from lampposts to kiosks to banisters, but I could never get the feeling right. Perhaps the grass and trees in the Yard introduced too much discontinuity, interrupting rhythms too sharply as I tried to move from one responsive surface to the next. Perhaps David was just better at it than I was. Somehow, though, I felt like there was a magic inherent in the spaces, that the whole world should play like a vast drum set, and the proper technique was only narrowly eluding me. In retrospect, the goofily pretentious audacity of wandering around a public space banging on things seems mind-boggling to me. Fifteen seconds into such a percussion tour today, and I'd be listening for the sirens coming to arrest me. I miss the obliviousness I once had. Banging on trash cans and building placards was, on one level, idiotic, but at the same time it demonstrated an inspiring faith that art could take place outside of any designated arena, or any scheduled time. Wouldn't our lives be richer if we felt, intuitively, that our world were an instrument, and our days and minutes in it were the measures of an all-encompassing performance?

Ghost Opera, of course, is imprisoned inside this little CD, planned and implemented by trained professionals, and so can't quite evoke the universal immanence I'm after, but it does, within the confines of its form, what it can. Splashes, rustles and clicks coexist with the conventional instruments of the quartet on completely equal terms, less like an incongruous bowl of liquid has been placed on the concert stage than like violins, violas and cellos have been discovered beside a burbling woodland creek. The performers howl and yelp, throughout the opera, like they are surrounded by animate spirits only barely held at bay, like the opera is as much something they are trapped in as it is something they are producing. The additional instruments, one-string lutes and Wu Man's pipa, and the keening, sliding string parts, give the music a cultural character that Van Tieghem's tour of Manhattan, despite its literal connection to the place, largely lacked. His performance only worked, I think now, because it was on video. His playing evoked Manhattan only because you saw him there; that is, his playing actually didn't evoke Manhattan. And perhaps this is why Harvard Yard didn't sound like Harvard Yard when I played it, either. The string instruments that weave together Western classical themes and Chinese folk tunes in Ghost Opera are translating, into sounds, an aura that we feel, in a place, through other senses. In a way we are living inside a giant instrument, if only we can stop taking things so literally that we can't see their truer selves.

If I don't worry about the cultural implications of the narration, though, I find Schwantner's music mesmerizing. The score to New Morning for the World is like a miniature Dvorak symphony, augmented by percussionist Evelyn Glennie with waves of violent, crashing timpani. Concerto for Percussion, the disc's middle piece, is a Glennie tour de force, involving, according to the notes, twenty different percussion instruments, surrounded by surging brass fusillades and eerie string fade-aways reminiscent of a Hitchcock soundtrack. And Velocities, the short opener, is a daunting solo-marimba workout that would make a great flip side to Steve Reich's Nagoya Marimbas, if singles still had flip sides, and classical musicians ever made singles.