This was why, when I added the finishing touches to my piano version of a modern alt-rock song, my pride was all-consuming and glorious: this arrangement was mine. What I’d done seemed magical: an ability to take what had already existed—to “steal” a song from my favorite band—and to change it into something different and all my own. I was a thief, but I was also an artist.

In music, as in other aspects of life, I believe that true originality rarely exists. Almost everything has, in one form or another, been done before. The most passionate romance novel may very well be a slightly changed version of a play by Shakespeare, which in turn is borrowed from the playwrights of Ancient Greece: same themes, different characters, different circumstances. But, the novel is no less deserving of praise just because its uniqueness is compromised. Adaptation is not a synonym for failure.

The gift of creativity is the ability to do what I did on the piano: to find something beautiful, to analyze and twist it and lose yourself in the mystery of its composition, and then to make it new. Such an act is not copying; it is finding inspiration and having the strength and the innovation to use it as fuel for your own masterpiece. The world is nothing more than disparate collections of preexisting parts—scattered and often lost in the chaos of everyday life. I believe it is my job, as an artist, to rearrange this world into what I envision it to be.

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