The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for adults. -Artur Schnabel
We cannot change the hand we are dealt, just how we play the hand. -Randy Pausch (see "Randy Pausch's Last Lecture" under Food for Thought)
Truly innovative people don't innovate, or at least not as any kind of conscious project. Instead, they embrace new ideas -- either because the ideas solve a problem, or else just because the people involved love them -- and make those ideas happen. Greg Sandow, blog entry in The Future of Classical Music (www.artsjournal.com/sandow/), Dec. 2, 2008
What is best in music is not to be found in the notes. –Gustav Mahler
Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless. –Thomas Alva Edison
Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day. –Abraham Maslow (http://sivers.org/maslow)
Music begins where words end. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If music be the food of love, play on: give me excess of it... --William Shakespeare
The love of one’s art is an aspect of technique. – Bruce Adolphe, The Mind’s Ear
Tshikona is lwa-ha-masia-khali-i-tshi-vhila, "the time when people rush to the scene of the dance and leave their pots to boil over." Tshikona "makes sick people feel better and old men throw away their sticks and dance." Tshikona "brings peace to the countryside...." It is an example of the production of the maximum of available human energy in a situation that generates the highest degree of individuality in the largest possible community of individuals. --John Blacking on the Venda (South African) national dance
I like nonsense. It wakes up the brain cells. – Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Suess)
Without the arts -- including music -- we risk graduating young people who are "right-brain damaged." - Paul Harvey
The arts, inspiring -- indeed requiring -- self-discipline, may be more "basic" to our national survival than traditional credit courses. Presently we are spending 29 times more on science than on the arts and the result so far is worldwide intellectual embarrassment. -Paul Harvey
I always loved music; whoso has skill in this art is of good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music; or I would not regard him. -Martin Luther
The point of music, as always, is not how clever it might be, but how expressively it communicates. – Rod Paton
Too many people today are trying to justify the precision with which organized musical sound is produced rather than the energy with which it is manipulated. –David Diamond (1939)
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. –Thomas Edison
The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes. –Sir Thomas Beecham
Learn to repeat difficult passages many times in a row. This is particularly important after the passage has been learned. – Philip Farkas, The Art of Horn Playing
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. – Confucius
To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult. – Plutarch
I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work. –Benjamin Franklin
Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know. –John Keats (1819)
When taking a shower, take a shower. When playing horn, play horn. -Zen Saying