Funnily, my deep conviction is that no idea or concept of true artistic importance can be imparted or transferred. The real things are those that you grow yourself in your own garden, without anyone overseeing. In that sense art is the land of absolute sole responsibility. There is nothing that cannot be challenged, but in […]

The only way to take classical music out of the museum is to stop playing it in a museum.  The adventurous cellist Matt Haimovitz said as much recently, when he toured dive bars, pizza parlours, and roadhouse juke joints with the [Bach] Cello Suites.  “People were reaction to the music as it was going by,” […]

“If you make people think they’re thinking they’ll love you: but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” Don Marquis, American writer, poet & artist. Creator of the characters such as Archy (1916), a cockroach who had been a poet in a previous life, who supposedly left poems on Marquis’ typewriter by jumping […]

The Belgian violinist Eugène Yasÿe frightened Busoni by playing the Bach Chaconne and Paganini Caprices on a kit violin in the darkened passages of a hotel.  ”It was like the ghost of Paganini, purposely exaggerating all the worst mannerisms of the typical virtuoso, and Busoni could never forget the sight of Ysaÿe’s vast bulk and […]

American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim has released a book Finishing the Hat: The Collected Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes.  The following is an extract from interview an article on Sondheim by Emma Brockes: Initially a maths student at Williams College in Massachusetts, the young Sondheim took […]

In the late nineteenth-century, some quite curious mechanical inventions were created to deal with the body with relation to pianists and conductors.    The following is an account of a presentation by T. L. Southgate on The Physiology of Pianoforte Piano. The paper presented was written by W. Macdonald Smith.  This account appeared in the […]

People are mistaken thinking that the creative artist uses art to express what he feels at the very moment of experience. Joy and sorrow are feelings expressed retrospectively. Without any particular cause for rejoicing I can be immersed in a mood of happy creativity and, conversely, I can produce, when cheerful, a piece saturated in […]

“Every disease is a music problem, its cure a musical solution.” Novalis, 18th century German author, mystic and philosopher. Cited in: Inge Kjemtrup, “The power of music therapy”, Pianist, Issue 59, April-May 2011. Warners Group Publications, p.66.

I came to think that every notation is already the transcription of an abstract invention. From the instant the pen takes hold of it, the idea loses its original feature. … The invention (Einfall) becomes a sonata, a concerto: it is already an arrangement of the original. From this first transcription to the second, the […]