A violent act pierces the atmosphere, leaving a hole through which the cold, damp draft of its memory blows forever.
Why is Schoenberg's Music so Hard to Understand?
Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.
I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy.
The best magic always results from ecstasies of logic.
I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.
Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge.
Passion paralyzes good taste.
Refugees are threatening, not just to Americans, but also in many countries the world over. And it's partially because, unlike immigrants, refugees do not choose where they're going to go or why they're fleeing, and they are unwanted populations. They bring with them the stigma of disaster.
I can relate to somebody wanting to have something to believe in.
Everything in this country [the US] has got to be good looks and unlined faces and thin bodies and people running around in skirts slit up to their ass. It has nothing to do with thinking or with being a human being. There is life in mature people; it's not all over at 24½.