LIFE SHRINKS OR EXPANDS IN PROPORTION TO ONE’S COURAGE.
ANAIS NIN
GEEORGE GERSHWIN. 1898-1937 “RHAPSODY IN BLUE”
LIFE is a lot like jazz . . . it’s best when you improvise.
WHEN I’M IN MY NORMAL MOOD, MJUSIC DRIPS FROM MY FINGERS.
ALL GREAT COMPOSERS of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won’t do the job. A man also needs technique.
WHY should I limit myself to only one woman when I can have as many women as I want?
I FREQUENTLY HEAR MUSIC IN THE VERY HEART OF NOISE.
TRUE MUSIC must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.
IT IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE TO CREATE SOMETHING ORIGINAL.
Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.
ROBERT STAUGHTON LYND 1892-1970 “MIDDLETOWN”.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER ONLY if man knows what facts not to bother with.
IT IS A GLORIOUS THING to be indifferent to suffering, BUT ONLY TO ONE’S OWN SUFFERING.
MOST OF US CAN REMEMBER a time when a birthday — especially if it was one’s own — brightened the world as if a second sun has risen.
MOST OF US BELIEVE in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve.
EVERY MAN OF GENIUS is considerably helped by being dead.
THERE IS NOTHING that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evil-doer.
ONE of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge.
I SOMETIMES SUSPECT that half our difficulties are imaginary & that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear.
CUT QUARRELS out of literature and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
CHARLES MUNCH 1891-1968 Conductor Boston Symphony.
ROGER VOISIN: “I FELT that Charles Munch was like a great impressionist painter. He was interested in the color of the music. He did not concentrate so particularly on the little details — a little fast, a little slow, a little high, a little low — but it was always a question of color, a question of the great artist’s sweep across a canvas.
“With Mr. Munch I was always allowed to give my own feeling, to be my own self. We know that we are bad sometimes, we prima donnas, and we should have a governing master, but if he did not agree with me, then he would tell me why.
“Mr. Munch like to tell his friends that he was conductor ‘only because I am too stupid to be anything else’.” N.Y.Times 11/7/1968
For him “beauty, joy and goodness” were the calling of an artist. As such, music, as he said in 1954, could offer “reconciliation with life itself.’
MUSIC is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious.
THE CONDUCTOR must breathe life into the score. It is you and you alone who must expose it to the understanding, reveal the hidden jewel to the sun at the most flattering angles.
THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIENCE of a hundred musicians is no light burden. Think for a moment of what it would mean to a pianist if by some miracle every key of his instrument should suddenly become a living thing.
IVAN PAVLOV 1849-1936 “pairing a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a conditioned response.”
DON’T become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.
THE DIGESTIVE CANAL represents a tube passing through the entire organism and communicating with the external world i.e. as it were the external surface of the body, but turned inwards and thus hidden in the organism.
THE GASTRIC LABORATORY uses its protein ferment under an acid reaction.
FINALLY, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the connections between them in order to investigate the connections of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts.
WHILE YOU ARE EXPERIMENTING, DO NOT REMIAN CONTENT WITH THE SURFACE OF THINGS.
APPETITE, craving for food, is a constant & powerful stimulator of the gastric glands.
IT HAS LONG BEEN KNOWN for sure that the sight of tasty food makes a hungry man’s mouth water; also lack of appetite has always been regarded as an undesirable phenomenon, from which one might conclude that appetite is essentially linked with the process of digestion.