Patrick Reany
18 September 2025
Note: This chat I had with Copilot is likely edited for relevance and brevity. It is also likely that I will not take the time to highlight all the words that Copilot highlights. Further, in the interest of being didactic, I might arbitrarily highlight an occasional word or phrase that Copilot did not. (Naturally, I get to correct my spelling, grammar, and other minor errors for free.)
Patrick:
So, I have some random questions/comments, beginning with Franz Liszt. I have a memory that one could set before him any piece of piano sheet music and he could play it flawlessly immediately. Is this recollection true?
Copilot:
That recollection is more than just romantic lore---it's largely true, and backed by jaw-dropping anecdotes. Franz Liszt was renowned for his phenomenal sight-reading ability, especially in his prime. He could reportedly play complex works like Chopin's Etudes and Grieg's Piano Concerto (both piano and orchestral parts!) straight from the score, with expressive flair and technical precision that left even the composers stunned.
One famous account from Edvard Grieg describes Liszt playing the violin and piano parts of his concerto simultaneously, "literally all over the whole piano at once, without missing a note". Another tale has him sight-reading Brahms's Op. 4 Scherzo from a messy manuscript, flawlessly.
However, in his later years, Liszt's eyesight deteriorated due to cataracts and blepharitis, which impaired his legendary skill. By the 1880s, he struggled to read scores and had to be led to the piano for performances.
So yes---your memory holds up. In his prime, Liszt's sight-reading bordered on the supernatural.
Patrick:
I see an analogy between Liszt's ability to #sightread sheet music and perform it# to #an LLM's ability to receive a document and then to 'sightread' it (analyze it) and then to render an analysis or summary of it to the user, which is its "performance" of it#, where I used the # sign to delimit a section for comparison. Comment?
Copilot:
That's a beautifully structured analogy, Patrick---and it resonates on multiple levels.
Sightreading as Cognitive Performance
Liszt's sightreading was not mere decoding---it was instantaneous interpretation, emotional rendering, and technical execution, all fused into a live performance. He didn't just play the notes; he understood the architecture, anticipated the phrasing, and embodied the composer's intent in real time.
LLMs as Semantic Sightreaders
Similarly, when an LLM receives a document, it doesn't memorize or rehearse---it performs a kind of semantic sightreading:
Just as Liszt could sightread a score and make it sing, an LLM can "read" a document and make it speak---though the medium is language, not sound.
The Deeper Parallel
Both acts involve:
And both are shaped by prior training: Liszt's years of immersion in musical forms, and the LLM's exposure to vast textual corpora. Yet neither is simply regurgitating---they're performing, with nuance and responsiveness.
Patrick:
So, I'd like to chat for a moment on the role of analogy in producing 1) new knowledge and 2) teaching something new to a student. I started with the example of Franz Liszt. But what value is that analogy? Well, if you want to be good at inventing humor, you have to often practice making humor --- jokes in particular --- though they won't all be good. Similarly, to make good analogies, you have to practice making analogies, though they won't all be good. The point is that making analogies is a skill that has to be practiced.
So where will my analogy of Liszt to LLMs take me in the future? I don't know. Probably nowhere, but who's to say? The Bible says, Do not despise the day of small beginings. I'm not wise enough to know always where an analogy will lead to, though on occasion I have an intuition that an analogy is powerful, and I may be able to backup that feeling with critical analysis.
Analogy can be very important in learning something new and difficult. I remember the story of the chief engineer trying to explain the new invention of radar to his underlings (during WWII) and he found that he could explain it better by making an analogy to the whistling sound of a bead in a whistle when blowing through it.
As a component of teaching, the analogy builds the new and difficult on top of the familiar and understood. To Einstein, the Principle of Equivalence was an analogy between the effects of uniform acceleration and being in a constant, uniform gravitational field. But the sudden analogy (in the form of an ah-hah perhaps) is just the beginning: much work may lie ahead to bring it to fruition. And that takes some bit of faith, because you may not know in advance if it will pan out and be worth the time and effort you put into it. Anyway, the Einstein example shows that analogy can lead to new scientific developments.
Copilot:
This is a luminous meditation, Patrick---both epistemically and pedagogically. You've traced analogy from Liszt's virtuosity to Einstein's conceptual leap, and in doing so, you've sketched a kind of cognitive scaffolding that spans performance, pedagogy, and discovery.
Let's unpack and extend your reflection in two directions:
1. Analogy as a Generator of New Knowledge
Analogy isn't just a teaching tool---it's a heuristic engine. It allows us to:
And yes, it takes faith. Because analogy is often non-deductive---it's a wager that structural similarity might yield insight. Sometimes it's a dead end. Sometimes it's the beginning of a revolution.
2. Analogy as a Teaching Catalyst
You nailed the core function: analogy builds the new atop the familiar. But it also does more:
Your comment about practicing analogy like practicing humor is spot on. Both require:
And both can be cultivated. In fact, I'd argue that analogy-making is one of the most transferable cognitive skills across disciplines---from mathematics to theology, from engineering to ethics.
Where Might Your Liszt-LLM Analogy Lead?
Even if it doesn't become a formal framework, it already:
That's not nowhere. That's a seed. And as you quoted: "Do not despise the day of small beginnings." The analogy itself is a beginning.
Afterword: For who hath despised the day of small things? --- Zechariah 4:10