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"Africa is everywhere, so pervasive in our lives that we barely see it. Since it is in all likelihood the continent where human evolution began, it is literally in the bloodstream of everyone. DNA aside, huge portions of everyday life and cultural achievement are unthinkable without Africa."

After he became a follower of Russian Orthodox Christianity, he spoke critically of Western Christian beliefs, and of the sacred music they yielded, including the works of Bach. In recent years this view softened: in 2007, he told a New York Times interviewer that he had reconsidered some of his beliefs and had returned to playing Bach on the organ. "I reached a point where everything I wrote was terribly austere and hidebound by the tonal system of the Orthodox Church," he said, "and I felt the need, in my music at least, to become more universalist: to take in other colors, other languages."

Rowland on the Quirinale exhibit in Rome (Feb-June 2010), and on the lonely, violent, ill-starred and powefully innovative painter who so connects with people of the 21st century.