Worry less about what you make — that will mostly look after itself, and is to some extent beyond your control, and perhaps even none of your business — and devote yourself to nourishing this animating spirit. Bring all your enthusiasm to bear on the development of that good and essential force. This is done by a commitment to the creative act itself. Each time you tend to that ingenious spark it grows stronger, and sets afire the ordinary gifts of the imagination.
N. Cave, The Red Hand Files, Issue # 181, January 2022, https://www.theredhandfiles.com/voices-of-all-your-influences/ (accessed 27 January 2022).
— Nick Cave
Nick Cave on the creative process
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The line and the harmony
Phrases have their own topography—they move forward with the line but also remain wedded to the ground with each change of harmony, and this is where the battle lies, why each piece of music grapples with its own destructive potential, why beauty is never what it appears to be. — Simon Tedeschi S. Tedeschi, Fugitive, […]
Accessibility for kidsBenjamin Britten wrote the score to Instruments of the Orchestra, which would become the concert work, Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra. The theme to the score was based on a hornpipe from Purcell’s Abdelzer. Britten commented to the producer, Basil Wright, that “I was never really worried that it was too sophisticated for kids […]
Bernstein’s response to violenceThis will be our response to violence To make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. – Leonard Bernstein.
Rachmaninoff on interpretationAs the talented student grows older he must seek within himself his interpretation. Does he wish to know how to play the cantilena of Beethoven or Chopin? He must feel it himself! Talent is feeling, the feeling that every player experiences in his innermost consciousness… It takes years of work to understand and think out […]
A Light Rises in the Darkness – Psalm 111 (112)Title: A Light Rises in the Darkness Psalm 111 (112): 4-9 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part.
Schnabel on recordingHaving spent five days recording five Beethoven sonatas and two concertos, Schnabel wrote to his wife: This week was an ordeal, a torture chamber. “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” says Nietzsche. Hopefully (probably) this is true. I had no idea of how outrageous a process the recording on discs could be. Like […]
Music acting as a spirit resonanceMy purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called "spirit resonance" in melody and sound. – Alan Hovhaness. Cited at The Alan Hovhaness Website: http://www.hovhaness.com/Hovhaness.html
A concise rehearsalHans Knappertsbusch (1888-1965) was a German conductor. However, he had a dislike of rehearsals. Karajan recalled: One time he was going over Tchaikovsky’s Fifth with the Vienna Philharmonic. He came to the second movement, with the horn solo, and said, “Let’s start.” He did a few bars, stopped, and said, “See you this evening. You […]
Brahms’ stingy sideMusicologist Richard Leonard describes a stingy side to Brahms’s personality: It is true that at times he was generous, giving away large sums to persons in need, and often imposing a strict secrecy; but about his own affairs he was as congenitally stingy as a peasant. He bought only the cheapest clothes, wore the same […]
Motion and art“The statue is concentrated in one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas posses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know nothing of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time […]