Nanosonatas In the summer of 2006 a young Japanese – actually Okinawan – friend of mine, Hideyuki Arata, a scientist and amateur pianist, sent me an article he had published in the American Journal of Applied Physics , at the end of which he gives me credit for ‘our valuable discussions on nanomolecular motors,’ together with a letter in which he informed me that my name would ‘now live forever in the annals of science.’ I thought I should send him something in exchange, so the idea of a ‘nanosonata,’ about two minutes long, technically somewhat demanding but not requiring a lot of practice, seemed right. I had a commission to write a new piece for Milton Schlosser in Edmonton, Alberta, and I liked the first nanosonata, so I thought that if I strung together, say, seven of them, it would fill the bill. Then a second commission came along, from the Hanover Society for New Music, for the young pianist Igor Levit. By that time the first se