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 )
The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea
and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense.
Nighttime is for sleeping.
( Benjamin Britten )
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 )
Perpetual modernness
is the measure of merit in every work of art.
( Emerson )
The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth.
( Monteverdi )
Beauty is what all modern artists endeavor to develop
to the highest possible degree.
( Ravel )
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.
This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
( John Cage )
The essence of all art is having pleasure giving pleasure.
( Mikhail Baryshinikov )
Leave your mind alone and see what happens.
( Virgil Thompson )
Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine,
all work is an act of creating.
( Ayn Rand )
The trick, of course, is to choose one’s commissions,
to compose what one wants to compose
and to get it commissioned afterward.
( Stravinsky )
I did my work slowly, drop by drop.
I tore it out of me by pieces.
( Ravel )
Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.
( Miles Davis )
There are two golden rules for an orchestra:
start together and finish together.
The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
Never look at the trombones – it only encourages them.
( Richard Strauss )
The real art of conducting consists in transitions.
( Mahler )
I never use a score when conducting my orchestra.
Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
( Dmitri Mitropolous )
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple,
which has no superfluous parts,
which exactly answers its end,
which stands related to all things,
which is the mean of many extremes.
( Emerson )
Great compositions
are not the fruits of inspiration alone,
but of severe, laborious and painstaking toll.
No composition will live long unless it has
both inspiration and craftsmanship.
( Brahms )
One ought, every day at least,
to hear a little song, read a good poem and,
if at all possible, speak a few reasonable words.
( Goethe )
Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties,
and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.
( Puccini )
All truly inspired ideas come from God.
( Brahms )
Many live in the ivory tower called reality;
they never venture on the open sea of thought.
( Francois Gautier )
Nature is a glorious school for the heart.
( Beethoven )
The more constraints one imposes,
the more one frees one's self.
And the arbitrariness of the constraint
serves only to obtain precision of execution.
( Stravinsky )
When music fails to agree with the ear,
to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses,
then it has missed its point.
( Maria Callas )
The end of all good music is to affect the soul.
( Monteverdi )
To send light into the darkness of men's hearts -
such is the duty of the artist.
( Robert Schumann )
An artist is a man of action,
whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient,
or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
( Joseph Conrad )
No artist is ahead of his time.
He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.
( Martha Graham )
To achieve great things, two things are needed:
a plan, and not quite enough time.
( Leonard Bernstein )
I write music with an exclamation point!
( Wagner )
I often compose three, even four, pieces simultaneously.
( Beethoven )
I finish one piece then begin the next.
( Schubert )
I write music as a sow piddles.
( Mozart )
As for my working habits, I like the idea of perfection.
If a thing is not right it is done over and over again.
( Erich Korngold )
I carry my thoughts about me for a long time,
often a very long time, before I write them down.
I make changes, reject and reattempt until I am satisfied.
( Beethoven )
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously
that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
( Jose Ortega y Gasset )
Great artists have no country.
( Alfred de Musset )
Art is a reality, not a definition;
inasmuch as it approaches a reality,
it approaches perfection,
and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition,
it is imperfect and untrue.
( Benjamin Haydon )
No artist has ethical sympathies.
An ethical sympathy in an artist
is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
( Oscar Wilde )
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art
should carry its justification in every line.
( Joseph Conrad )
Making social comment
is an artificial place for an artist to start from.
If an artist is touched by some social condition,
what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
( Bella Lewitzky )
In the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime,
when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.
( Oscar Wilde )
Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.
( Mahler )
The composing of fugues is the art of making musical skeletons.
( Beethoven )
The barriers are not erected
which can say to aspiring talents and industry,
"Thus far and no farther."
( Beethoven )
Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
( Ad Reinhardt )
There doesn’t have to be any reason in the field of aesthetics.
There isn’t any point to it.
There doesn’t have to be a point in it;
that is not demanded in the field of aesthetics.
( L Ron Hubbard )
Art does not tolerate reason.
( Albert Camus )
Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.
( Ravel )
Every great work of art has two faces:
one toward its own time
and one toward the future, toward eternity.
( Daniel Barenboim )
In art the hand can never execute anything higher
than the heart can aspire.
( Emerson )
I carry my thoughts about me for a long time,
often a very long time, before I write them down.
I make changes, reject and reattempt
until I am satisfied.
( Beethoven )
It is not hard to compose,
but what is fabulously hard is
to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
( Brahms )
After all, a masterpiece is in no hurry.
It transcends time. It can be misunderstood or ignored –
all this is quite unimportant;
and the time will come
when its beauty will be revealed
without any outside assistance.
( Schönberg )
I begin by considering an effect.
( Ravel )
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four.
If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two.
Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
( John Cage )
If you listen to great music and enjoy it,
then by all means listen to it again.
On the other hand, if you listen and don’t enjoy it,
then you must listen again
because there was something you missed.
( Very old and sage advice )
Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth,
the four acts of the comic opera known as life,
and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne.
Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them
is a complete fool.
( Rossini )
The essence of aesthetics is a wide differentiation,
the very essence of it – not logic.
( L Ron Hubbard )
A work of art that contains theories
is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
( Marcel Proust )
Most of the time, you have to be or will be
in a semi-trance condition to get [inspired] results.
( Brahms )
He who sings scares away his woes.
( Miguel de Cervantes )
Habit may depreciate the most brilliant talents.
( Beethoven )
Composers are doers of deeds.
( Roger Sessions )
