Imagination disposes and creates

“Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world.”

— Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher.

Ramage, Craufurd Tait (1866) Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian Authors.  Liverpool: Edward Howell, p.232. Digitally archived at https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=nDErAAAAYAAJ&hl=en_AU, accessed 12 September 2021.

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Prokofiev is evicted
Sergey Prokofiev was once evicted from his apartment for playing the same chord 218 times.  A tally was kept by the downstairs tenant. Source: Lawrence, Christopher (2001) Swooning.  Sydney: Random House, p.69.
Paul Simon on music today
Paul Simon (of Simon and Garfunkel) on the future of the “album” concept: I don’t think the album is going to disappear for several reasons … It’s not that people aren’t listening to albums.  They’re just doing it on shuffle.  What that does is it makes albums more eclectic and more interesting.  But if an […]
Blessed the People the Lord has Chosen (Setting II) – Psalm 32 (33)
Title: Blessed the people the Lord has chosen (setting ii) Text: Psalm 32 (33) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:
Salvation by imagination
“An idea is salvation by imagination.” – Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect
The addictive nature of song writing
“You know it’s sort of addictive because there is all this gold just floating in the ether around you. The process of song writing is this process of just discovering and putting together these beautiful animals that live on their own and run around the world and make people feel good or go on trips […]
Wie melodien zieht es mir (Brahms)
Composer: Johannes Brahms Text: Klaus Groth Title: Wie melodien zieht es mir (Like melodies it pulls me), op. 105, no. 1 Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:  
Focus
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. – Alexander Graham Bell Orison Swett Marden, (1901) “Bell Telephone Talk”, How They Succeeded. Boston: Lothrop Publishing Company, p. 38. Digitally archived at https://archive.org/details/howtheysucceeded00mardrich/mode/2up, accessed 11 September 2021.
Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies
The importance of good texts
Mozart described the importance of good operatic texts in a letter regarding The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) in a letter to his father in 1781: …the Poesie is totally in tune with the character if this stupid, coarse, and malicious Osmin [the servant character] – and I am well aware […]
On Artur Schnable’s playing
Artur Schnabel is a pianist unlike any other. One is conscious in listening to him of a powerful and original mind revealing unsuspected meanings and complications in music as familiar as Brahms’s Intermezzi and Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. His tone is a rule dry in anything above a piano, but a sudden touch of the pedal […]