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Click to read Swiss
novelist Robert Walser's (1878-1956) essay about
music (I scanned the relevant
1.5 pages from his short stories book titled "Masquerade and Other
Stories". In fact the essay belongs to his young hero Fritz
Kocher. A real delight! 
There are two kinds of
music: good music and bad music.
Cemil
Gandur suggested that I add this qoutation. He said that it is
from Duke Ellington. Another source claims it to be a popular
saying. Any other views?
I am still finding more sound in small
changes. I am a long way from what I suspect is possible. There is
no hurry, no urgency, just vast promise.
Alan J.
Marcy (during an interview with Adnan Arduman on 28 October
2001.
See
more)
Without music life would be an error.
Nitzsche
Conductors must give unmistakable and
suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the
audience.
George
Szell
There are more love songs than anything
else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one
another.
Frank
Zappa
Without music to decorate it, time is just a
bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must
be paid.
Frank
Zappa
It is cruel, you know, that
music should be so beautiful. It has the
beauty
of loneliness & of
pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty
of
disappointment &
never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature,
&
everlasting beauty of
monotony.
Benjamin
Britten (1913-76), British composer. Letter, 29 June
1937
(published
in Letters from a Life: Letters and Diaries of Benjamin
Britten,
vol.
1, "A Working Life," 1991). Britten wrote this while listening to
the
"Abschied"-the
finale of Mahler's song cycle Das Lied von der
Erde.
A verbal art like poetry is
reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to
become.
W.
H. Auden (1907-73), Anglo-American poet. The Dyer's Hand, pt. 8,
"Notes on Music and Opera"
(1962).
Truly fertile Music, the
only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will
be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and
analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel.
Art does not tolerate Reason.
Albert
Camus (1913-60), French-Algerian philosopher, author. "Essay on
Music," in Sud (Algiers, June 1932; repr. in Youthful Writings,
1976).
Great music is that which
penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with
difficulty. Magical music never leaves the
memory.
Sir
Thomas Beecham (1879-1961), British conductor. Quoted in: Sunday
Times (London, 16 Sept. 1962).
All art constantly aspires
towards the condition of
music.
Walter
Pater (1839-94), English essayist, critic. Studies in the History
of the Renaissance, "The School of Giorgione"
(1873).
It is the stretched soul
that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of
opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where
there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one
direction-there will be much doing but no
music.
Eric
Hoffer (1902-83), U.S. philosopher. Reflections on the Human
Condition, aph. 108 (1973).
There's a basic rule which
runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I
don't know what it is. But I've got
it.
Ron
Wood (b. 1947), British rock musician. Independent (London, 10
Sept. 1992).
People whose sensibility is
destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate
on a Beethoven Quartet.
Witold
Lutoslawski (b. 1913), Polish composer. Independent on Sunday
(London, 13 Jan. 1991).
It is better to make a piece
of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen
to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of
distraction, entertainment, or acquisitiuon of
"culture."
John
Cage (1912-92), U.S. composer. "Forerunners of Modern Music; At
Random," in Tiger's Eye (New York, March 1949; repr. in Silence,
1961).
Alas! all music jars when
the soul's out of tune.
Miguel
de Cervantes (1547-1616), Spanish writer. Altisidora, in Don
Quixote, pt. 2, bk. 6, ch. 11 (1615; tr. by P.
Motteux).
The man that hath no music
in himself,
Nor is not moved with
concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons,
stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his
spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark
as Erebus.
Let no such man be
trusted.
William
Shakespeare (1564-1616), English dramatist, poet. Lorenzo, in The
Merchant of Venice, act 5, sc. 1, responding to Jessica's remark,
"I am never merry when I hear sweet
music."
Music is the effort we make
to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach
transfixed because this is listening to a human
mind.
Lewis
Thomas (1913-94), U.S. physician, educator. The Medusa and the
Snail, "On Thinking about Thinking"
(1979).
I think no woman I have had
ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the
moment I owe to a newly heard musical
phrase.
Stendhal (1783-1842), French author.
Letter, 29 Oct. 1808, to his sister Pauline.
The most perfect expression
of human behavior is a string
quartet.
Jeffrey
Tate (b. 1943), British conductor. New Yorker (30 April
1990).
If anyone has conducted a
Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an
osteopath, then there's something
wrong.
Simon
Rattle (b. 1955), British conductor. Guardian (London, 31 May
1990).
The musical emotion springs
precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds
or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of
a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of
wholly divining. . . . If the composer withholds more than we
anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel
we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and
thrust into the void. . . . When the composer withholds less, the
opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more
skillful than our own.
Claude
LÈvi-Strauss (b. 1908), French anthropologist. The Raw and
the Cooked, "Overture" (1964).
It is the only sensual
pleasure without vice.
Samuel
Johnson (1709-84), English author, lexicographer. Quoted in:
"Anecdotes by William Seward," in European Magazine (1795; repr.
in Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, ed. by George Birkbeck Hill,
1897, p. 301).
The notes I handle no better
than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes-ah, that is
where the art resides.
Artur
Schnabel (1882-1951), German-born U.S. pianist. Quoted in: Chicago
Daily News (11 June 1958).