“Music so wishes to be heard that sometimes it calls on unlikely characters to give it voice, and ears. This wishing-to-be heard calls into existence the Performance Event; where music, musician and audience may come together as one, in communion. This communion has six different forms of being and experiencing itself (plus an invisible seventh); and these forms, or principles, are simultaneously present within the Performance.
I - When people get together with music, something happens.
II - In a performance, things come together, mysteriously; and go better than we might anticipate; and better than we deserve.
III - A performance can take on a life and character of its own.
IV - Any one performance is a multiplicity of performances.
V - The possible is possible.
VI - The impossible is possible.
The Seventh Principle resides within Silence.
Trust the event.”
The Six Principles of the Performance Event
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Robert Fripp 17
English guitarist, composer and record producer 1946Related quotes
“When they come together to make music, the Welsh sing their traditional songs, not in unison, as is done elsewhere, but in parts, in many modes and modulations. When a choir gathers to sing, which happens often in this country, you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers.”
In musico modulamine, non uniformiter, ut alibi, sed multipliciter, multisque modis et modulis, cantilenas emittunt. Adeo ut in turba canentium, sicut huic genti mos est, quot videas capita, tot audias carmina discriminaque vocum varia.
Book 1, chapter 13, p. 242.
Descriptio Cambriae (The Description of Wales) (1194)
As quoted in Through Music to the Self : How to Appreciate and Experience Music Anew (1979) by Peter Michael Hamel, p. 18
Context: Elemental Music is never just music. It's bound up with movement, dance and speech, and so it is a form of music in which one must participate, in which one is involved not as a listener bust as a co-performer. It is pre-rational, has no over-all form, no architectonics, involves no set sequences, ostinati or minor rondo-forms. Elemental Music is earthy, natural, physical, capable of being learnt and experienced by anybody, child's play.... Elemental Music, word and movement, play, every-thing that awakens and develops the powers of the soul builds up the humus of the soul, the humus without which we face spiritual soil-erosion.... we face spiritual soil-erosion when man estranges himself from the elemental and loses his balance.
“I have heard
the big music
and I'll never be the same
something so pure
just called my name.”
"The Big Music"
This Is the Sea (1985)
From his will, in which he provided for his conducting scores, manuscript orchestral transcriptions, and recordings to archived and accessible to the public. The Stokowski Archives are now housed in the University of Pennsylvania Library.
“music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but
you are the music
While the music lasts.”
Source: Collected Poems, 1909-1962
Page 196
Testimony (1979)
On Wynton Marsalis and the revival of traditional jazz
Prasad interview (1997)
Sarkis an old Greek Shepherd, called the madman: Jesus and Pan
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: "And now let us play our reeds together."
And they played together.
And their music smote heaven and earth, and a terror struck all living things.
I heard the bellow of beasts and the hunger of the forest. And I heard the cry of lonely men, and the plaint of those who long for what they know not.
I heard the sighing of the maiden for her lover, and the panting of the luckless hunter for his prey.
And then there came peace into their music, and the heavens and the earth sang together.
All this I saw in my dream, and all this I heard.