Boyd Neel was the first conductor to record Vaughan William’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis in 1935. He wrote: I often feel that this wonderful work is perhaps the greatest of all achievements in string orchestral composition. Boyd Neel (1986) The Story of an Orchestra. London: Vox Mundi, p.22. Cited in: Holmes, John […]

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 […]

“It’s a very reactionary viewpoint and I’m slightly ashamed, but I find it very difficult to access contemporary music. I am not prejudiced, but my work in tonal music leads me to believe nothing can be organic if it doesn’t have a [sense of] “home.”  This idea of belonging, or home, can’t be an intellectual […]

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel—or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel—is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never known another human […]

“Success is not a doorway, it’s a staircase.” — Dottie Walters

While attending school in Lüneberg, J. S. Bach used to travel to Hamburg (50km away) to hear the organist of the Catharinekirche: J. A. Reincken.  Marpurg describes how Bach, returning almost penniless to Lüneberg, once rested outside an inn; how someone threw two herring heads out on the rubbish heap; how Bach – a Thuringian, to […]

“Art,” announces Pat Buchanan to Charlie Rose, “is meant to be uplifting.” What a relief!  After all these years I’d never realized that Art had a moral purpose.  No more need now to be upset by Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Picasso and Goya, Stravinsky and Berg, Sophocles and Williams.  Pat has clarified the rules, set the […]

Ravel’s infamous Boléro was somewhat created by chance: Shortly before Ravel left for America, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein had asked him for a ballet to be based on orchestrations of parts of Albéniz’s Iberia. To this he agreed; with so much on his plate he was not anxious to undertake further commitments for wholly original composition. […]

“The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn.” -Alvin Toffler, American writer and futurist Cited at QuotationsBook

The one bee in my bonnet is over-pedalling, and I give my students a hard time about that. It’s the lack of being able to play a true legato with the fingers.  People rely on the pedal for that, and the pedal is not there for that.  The pedal is for putting the gloss on.  […]