Isaac Goldberg, a friend of George Gershwin, described the composer’s personality: HE was as simple, as unaffected, as modest, and as charming a youth as one could desire to meet. There was nothing about him that was forbidding. He wore his unprecedented celebrity as lightly as if it were a cane – that cane which […]

Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) was a Belgian violinist, conductor and composer. Carl Flesch described him has “the most outstanding and individual violinist I have ever heard in my life.” Franck’s Violin Sonata, Chausson’s Poem and violin concerto, and Debussy’s string quartets were all dedicated to Ysaÿe. Ysaÿe wrote six sonatas for solo violin, each dedicated to […]

“I need to start from the assumption that the world of spirit is ordered, structured by its very nature, that everything  which causes disharmony in the world, all that is monstrous, inexplicable, and dreadful … And the formula for world harmony is most likely linked not to the blurring of evil but to the fact […]

A letter written by composer Ludwig van Beethoven has emerged in Germany after being left in a will. In the six-page document of Beethoven’s scrawled corrections, he complains about his illness and a lack of money. Experts were already aware of the 1823 letter’s existence, but say it is of historic value. BBC News, 11 […]

“In higher art, only that is worth being presented which has never before been presented.  There is no great work of art which does not convey a new message to humanity; there is no great artist who fails in this respect.  This is the code of honor of all the great art, and consequently in […]

My love for Schubert is a very serious one, probably because it is no fleeting fancy. Where is genius like his, which soars heavenwards so boldly and surely, where we see the few supreme ones enthroned. He is to me like a son of the gods, playing with Jupiter’s thunder, and also occasionally handling it […]

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols

With shifts in the commercial music industry away from smooth jazz, musicians are finding new niches for smooth jazz such as cruises. Twenty years ago, of course, smooth jazz wasn’t a code to be cracked so much as a wave to be caught. Like most species of pop, it felt ubiquitous and maybe a little […]

At the core of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, an esoteric and astonishing piano piece lasting some 50 minutes, is one of the intriguing mysteries of music history. Why did Beethoven, during the difficult last decade of his life, when he was deaf, chronically ill and often in financial straits, become nearly obsessed with writing an extensive […]

“Face the facts of being who you are, for that is what changes what you are.” Søren Kierkegaard, Danish writer. Cited at QuotationsBook