ADVICE
Only in structure can one find solace.
( Schönberg )
Music is geometry in time.
( Honegger )
I firmly believe that joy is far more fertile than suffering.
( Ravel )
He whose preoccupation is with excellence
longs fervently to find rest in perfection.
And is not nothingness a form of perfection?
( Thomas Mann )
Only become a musician
if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living.
( Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer )
The function of the creative artist consists in making laws,
not in following laws already made.
( Busoni )
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
( WB Yeats )
I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists
as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.
( Queen Victoria )
The essence of genius: knowing how to work intelligently,
and how to organize one’s ideas.
( Ravel )
Art never expresses anything but itself.
( Oscar Wilde )
The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music.
( Boulez )
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
( John Cage )
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
( Oscar Wilde )
In art everything must be thought out.
( Ravel )
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
Economics and art are strangers.
( Willa Cather )
Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
( Emerson )
Stand up before this music and use your God given ears.
( Ives, on Ruggles )
The luck of having talent is not enough;
one must also have a talent for luck.
( Berlioz )
Discipline, work. Work, discipline.
( Mahler )
Talent works, Genius creates.
( Robert Schumann )
My intention is to make it clear
that not a single cell of my composition
is found by chance or intuition,
that the composition moved toward perfection
with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.
( Ravel )
Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.
( William Blake )
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else,
a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy;
only the artist, the great artist,
knows how difficult it is.
( Willa Cather )
One supreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not willpower,
but fantasy-imagination that creates. Imagination is the creative force. Imagination creates reality.
( Wagner )
Young man, if perchance a tune should occur to you,
please, don’t hesitate to write it down.
( Vaughan Williams, after reading a student’s “very modern” score )
Sound Tonal, Think Atonal.
( Mikkelsen )
Consonances?
They are not excluded but have to be introduced carefully.
( Schoenberg )
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge
wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.
( Thomas Mann )
When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I’m slipping.
( Maria Callas )
Composers should write melodies
that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
Time is a great teacher who kills all of its pupils.
( Berlioz )
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously
that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
( Jose Ortega y Gasset )
I consider sincerity to be the greatest defect in art,
because it excludes the possibility of choice.
Art is meant to correct nature's imperfections.
Art is a beautiful lie.
( Ravel )
The object of Art is not to reproduce reality,
but to create a reality of the same intensity.
( Alberto Giacometti )
The [piano] player should avoid all romantic affectation.
( Debussy )
Expression of feeling rather than painting.
( Beethoven, motto of his own Sixth Symphony )
Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.
( Robert Schumann )
Inspiration is of such importance in composing,
but by no means all that there is to it.
Structure is just as consequential, for without craftsmanship,
inspiration is a ‘mere reed shaken in the wind’
or ‘sounding brass or tinkling cymbals’.
( Brahms )
Ever since I began to compose,
I have remained true to my starting principle:
not to write a page because no matter what public,
or what pretty girl wanted it to be thus or thus;
but to write solely as I myself thought best,
and as it gave me pleasure.
( Mendelssohn )
Play with more sensitiveness in the fingertips.
Play chords as if the keys were being attracted to your fingertips
and rose to your hand as a magnet.
( Debussy )
Always place the hands at the keyboard
so that the fingers can not be raised higher than is necessary;
only in this way is it possible to produce a singing tone.
( Beethoven )
The notes I handle no better than many pianists.
But the pauses between the notes –
ah, that is where the art resides!
( Arthur Schnabel )
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome,
but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
( Emerson )
Simplicity is the final achievement.
After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes,
it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
( Chopin )
When one allows oneself spontaneity,
one babbles and that's all.
In art, everything must be thought out.
( Ravel )
Artists who are enamored of practice without science
are like sailors who board a ship without rudder and compass,
never having any certainty as to whither they go.
( da Vinci )
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
( Paul Cezanne )
Art and science only can raise a man to godhood.
( Beethoven )
I do not try to think in advance –
I can only start to work and hope to leap a little in my spirit.
( Stravinsky )
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty.
I only think about how to solve the problem.
But when I have finished,
if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
( Buckminster Fuller )
To seek assiduously the most delicate
and subtle features of human nature –
of the human crowd, to follow them into unknown regions,
to make them our own;
this seems to me the true vocation of the artist.
( Moussorgsky )
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration,
if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
( Stravinsky )
You will never become a great composer
until you first become a great English composer.
( Ravel’s advice to a young Vaughn Williams )
The key to the mystery of a great artist
is that for reasons unknown,
he will give away his energies and his life
just to make sure
that one note follows another...
and he leaves us with the feeling
that something is right in the world.
( Leonard Bernstein )