More on Music
I hear noises which others don't hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which others don't hear either.
Karl Kraus Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories.
More positively, taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension, the proof that we understand it, and we may extend that to sympathy with other listeners' enjoyment ...
Charles Rosen The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
The Development, beginning in measure 132, is a striking example of how difficult it was—even for an exponent of freedom in musical expression like Schumann—to break loose from the shackles of arbitrary form.
I'd never heard anything like it before. It was like banshee music. This absolutely otherworldly voice, singing about a book, and as a bookish kid, I was always fascinated by anything, any music that seems to be about or inspired by books.
Painting, literature, music, are more closely allied than the public usually admit. They are merely different means of expression.
But music has its own enchantment and the first few notes of an old tune are all that it requires to transform any site into a place of magic, even if that location is no more than a windowless office cubicle in the old Firehall’s basement.
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