Brahms formed a Ladies Choir of about fifty singers: “Fix oder Nix” was the motto he coined for them – “Bang up or nothing”; and he promised to write all the music they could sing if they would meet regularly, and always on time.  He even drew up a set of humorous rules.  “Avertimento” it […]

“I do not choose my listeners. What I mean is, I never write for my listeners. I think about my audience, but I am not writing for them. I have something to tell them, but the audience must also put a certain effort into it. But I never wrote for an audience and never will […]

The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration. – Steven Pressfield S. Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, New York, Black Irish Entertainment, 2002, p.18

“Writing and performing an opera, creating any work of art in a world of violence and ease, hunger and obesity, could seem to be an act of private withdrawal. But art isn’t about itself, it’s about how men relate to the world and each other … Asking artists to keep politics out of art is […]

“Writing music is seventy-five per cent an intellectual activity.  This effort is often more pleasant for me than having a rest.” Conversation with Ravel, recalled by Robert de Fragny, Echo liberté, 7 November 1950. Cited in: Nichols, Roger (1987) Ravel Remembered.  London: Faber & Faber., p. 61.

The conductor Leopold Stokowski had a love hate relationship with his audience: He wooed them and cajoled them, flattered them and then gently reproved them.  When they grew fidgety, he shamed them into attentiveness and concentration.  “Please don’t do that,” he once admonished an audience of program shufflers.  “We work hard all week to give […]

“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” – Paul Johannes Tillich, German American theologian and philosopher

“Technique is not music. Music is the thousandth of a millisecond between one note to the other—that’s where the music is.”  — Isaac Stern, in an interview with Mark Stryker Cited in: Green, Barry (2003) The Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry. New York: Broadway Books, p. 2.

“My music is melodic.  After all, why add to the world’s problem’s with bad music.” Alexander Prior, composer. Source: Classic FM, December 2009, p.9

Rodney Greenberg describes a side of George Gershwin’s “romantic side”: He wrote a little waltz-song, which he would sing and play to his current dating partner.  It was, in effect, what his friend Kitty Carlisle (who later married playwright Moss Hart) described as his “mating call”, because he left a blank space in the lyrics […]