Trust yourselfAll this, my friend, will time provide, And of itself, itself will give; Soon as you in yourself confide, You know the way to live! — Mephistopheles to Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, translated by Lewis Filmore, (London: William Smith, 1847), p. 79. First published in the German as Faust: eine Tragödie, […]
Reincken on Bach’s playingThe famous organist Reincken heard Bach play. Bach improvised for half an hour on the hymn “By the Waters of Babylon”. Reincken said: “I thought such art was dead, but I see it still lives in you.” Siblin, Eric (2009) The Cello Suites. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, p. 58.
The limits of imaginationYou’re travelling to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound… but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land, whose boundaries are only that of the imagination… you’re entering… the Twilight Zone… – Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone
“Didn’t you like it?”Leonard Bernstein and Mildred Spiegel attended the Boston Symphony Orchestra season in 1933. They sat, she remembers, in the second balcony “under one of the male Greek nude statues.” One evening, during a standing ovation for the orchestra’s music director, Serge Koussevitzky, Lenny “just sat there” clapping very softly. “What’s the matter,” I asked, “didn’t […]
That’s a wrapElectronic music composer Jeff Bryant never imagined that learning to knit would be part of his graduate coursework at California Institute of the Arts. But when his interface design instructor challenged him to build a non-boring MIDI controller device last fall, Bryant found an unlikely musical ally: red yarn. By weaving conductive thread into the […]
Ravel’s fine attributes as a composerOn his tour to America in 1928, Ravel was highly praised by music critics. In the New York Times, Olin Downeswrote: Never to have composed in undue haste; never to have offered the public a piece of unfinished work; to have experienced life as an observant and keenly interested beholder, and to have fashioned certain […]
Following the crowd“The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been before.” Alan Ashley-Pitt (Francis Phillip Wernig) Cited in: Eda LeShan (1973) The Wonderfujl Crisis of Middle Age. New York: Warner Books, p. 304.
Abstraction IVTitle: Abstraction IV Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:
Accomplishing great things“To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan… believe… act!” – Alfred Montapert, Author Cited at: QuotationsBook