Music exists only in a passing of time, racing past us like the mid-nineenth-century trains Ruskin so hated. It is utterly non-fixed, and to focus on one moment is to destroy the whole. It is a forest that we have to pass through, not a single tree that we can contemplate or capture. But, if hearing and seeing beauty have different timetables they both require a sort of repetition in order to be fully appreciated: music needs to be heard many times, and the visual world needs multiple, if consecutive, seconds of looking. Only in such repetition perhaps can we grasp or hold onto beauty.
S. Hough, Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More, London, Faber & Faber, 2019, p. 225.
– Stephen Hough
Appreciating beauty
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Rachmaninoff scares me
Cyril Smith recounts Rachmaninoff’s stage presence: Those who were fortunate enough to hear him play will almost certainly remember this very tall, melancholy figure, with his graying hair in a crew cut and his deeply-lined face set in a somber expression, walking unwillingly to the piano as though he hated the very sight of it. […]
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Saint-Saëns on the art of musicThe artist who does not feel completely satisfied by elegant lines, by harmonious colours, and by a beautiful succession of chords does not understand the art of music. — Camille Saint-Saëns Cited in Milton Cross David Ewan, Encyclopedia of Great Composers and Their Music, volume 2. Double Day, 1969, p.819.
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