Content of art

How can you expect a beholder to experience my picture as I experienced it? A picture comes to me a long time beforehand; who knows how long a time beforehand, I sensed, saw, and painted it and yet the next day even I do not understand what I have done. How can anyone penetrate my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thought, which have taken a long time to fashion themselves and come to the surface, above all to grasp what I put there, perhaps involuntary?

Pablo Picasso, 1934

Cited in: Friedenthal, Richard (trans. Daphne Woodward) (1963) Letters of the Great Artists – from Blake to Pollock. London: Thames and Hudson, p.260.

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Hilary Hahn on the “story” behind the music
I think the back stories [behind the creation of a work] are interesting … But for me the first aim is to look at the notes, and see how I might interpret them … No offence to the media, but I’ve seen stories told about people I know – and about me – that are […]
Brahms’ stingy side
Musicologist 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 […]
Beauty Around Us – Bernhard Severin Ingemann
Title: Beauty Around Us Composer: Greg Smith Based on text by: Bernhard Severin Ingemann Instrumentation: Piano (easy) Product medium: PDF score     Related products:     – Beauty Around Us (piano version)     – Beauty Around Us (easy piano version)     – Beauty Around Us (mp3) SAMPLE:    
Elegie II
Title: Elegie II Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:
Copland on film music
American composer Aaron Copland on the role of film music: I was very fascinated by the medium because a composer can be a real help in the making of a film. The way you can prove that, of course, is to see a film before the public has seen it, in the studio room, and […]
Maiky’s recording of Bach’s cello suites
“The Latvian cellist Mischa Maisky recorded the Bach’s cello suites “at a small guest house he converted into a studio and called Sarabande, he had a fence built around it with all the notes of the fifth sarabande crafted on the metalwork.  He gleefully points out that the studio’s address is 720, his Montagnana cello […]
Hoffman on technique
Technic  represents the material side of art, as money represents the material side of life.  By all means achieve a fine technic, but do no dream that you will be artistically happy with this alone.  There is a technic which liberates and a technic which represents the artistic self.  All technic ought to be a […]
Inspiration
“Our happiness in this world depends on the affections we are able to inspire.” – Duchess Prazlin Cited at QuotationsBook
Imagination
“Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world’s supreme good.” – Pascal Blaise, French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. C. Prendergast, A history of modern French literature: from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 237.
The significance of the individual
  “You are an extremely valuable, worthwhile, significant person even though your present circumstances may have you feeling otherwise.” – James Newmann, American mathematician