Is there not something perverse to how the lyrical variations, the variations that reach toward tenderness, are also those that deploy canonic devices? And how the most poignant, the most vulnerable of these — #10 and #14 — are those whose canons are the most severe, the most exacting: canon inversus and canon at the interval of the second? 

Fragrance of Rose and Heliotrope, he inscribed the manuscript of #10. At first the soprano and bass lines move in near-perfect inversion, like how two people dancing might mirror each other’s movements, or how two hands placed palm against palm might mirror each other’s gestures. Am I wrong to see, as the bass lines dissolves into arpeggios, fragrances dissolving into warm evening air?

Am I wrong to hear, in #14, some echo of the minor seconds from Bach’s overture to Actus Tragicus or his later Herr, unser Herrscher: points of piercing light above a clockwork sea, restless with the ecstasy of the spirit and the yearning of the flesh?