„I do not mean that it is not worthwhile to attempt a revision of the canon or that no success is possible. A few valuable minor changes have been made to our sense of the basic material of the history of music, and other alterations are still waiting to take hold. Gesualdo has not displaced Monteverdi or Palestrina but has won a permanent place; on the other hand, the attempt to convince us that Telemann is a major composer appears to have been abandoned. Alkan has not had the breakthrough his admirers had hoped for. Attacks on Tchaikovsky have not had much success in removing his music from the repertory; his credit with performers has not changed a bit.“

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 2 : How to Become Immortal

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 16, 2021.

Charles Rosen69

American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

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„The initial inspiration for me to take up dancing came from seeing performances of Gauri Ammal when I was very young. If this lady had not brought the dance to such a stage of development, the combination of music and dance that I have attempted to realize would not have been possible.“

— Balasaraswati Indian dancer 1918 - 1984

Quoted in "Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life", pp=25-26
Quote

Music, Dance

„Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority.“

— Martin Luther King, Jr. American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement 1929 - 1968

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
Context: Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations. When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority.

Support, Success

„What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?“

— Charles Mingus American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader 1922 - 1979

As quoted in Setting the Tempo : Fifty Years of Great Jazz Liner Notes (1996) by Tom Piazza. p. 339
Context: What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music? Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. Maybe they wouldn't have been as good because when people are born free — I can't imagine it, but I've got a feeling that if it's so easy for you — the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.

Love, Music, Thinking, Waiting

„Revision is a dangerous word. Revision should never appear, I venture to think, in the mouth of a statesman or in the policy of a Government until they are prepared to define very closely the limits within which they think revision should take place. The long history of this country has in one sense been a history of the revision of Treaties. We have revised and revised and what have we got for it? What concession once made has any longer kept the value it had before it was revised? Of which of these concessions can it be said at this present moment that it has tempered feeling in Germany, that it has produced that friendly spirit that those who made it desired to promote? What is passing in Germany seems to me to render this a singularly inopportune moment to talk about the revision of Treaties.“

— Austen Chamberlain British politician 1863 - 1937

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1933/apr/13/adjournment-easter-1 in the House of Commons (13 April 1933) questioning revisions of the Treaty of Versailles
1930s

Feeling, History, Thinking, Sense

„No composer has written as much as 100 bars of worthwhile music since 1925.“

— Thomas Beecham British conductor and impresario 1879 - 1961

Conductors by John L. Holmes (1988) pp 31-37 ISBN 0-575-04088-2

Music

„Maslow's psychology, firmly based upon Freud and Watson, simply points out that the optimistic side of the picture has been overlooked; the deterministic laws of our 'lower nature' hold sway in their won field; but there are other laws. Man's freedom is a reality -- a reality that makes a difference to his physical, as well as his mental health. When Frankl's prisoners ceased to believe in the possibility of freedom, they grew sick and died. On the other hand, when they saw that Dachau had no chimney, standing out all night in the rain seemed no great hardship; they laughed and joked. The conclusion needs to be stated in letters ten feet high. In order to realise his possibilities, man must believe in an open future; he must have a vision of something worth doing. And this will not be possible until all the determinism and pessimism that we have inherited from the 19th century -- and which has infected every department of our culture, from poetry to atomic physics -- has been dismissed as fallacious and illogical. Twentieth century science, philosophy, politics, literature -- even music -- has been constructed upon a weltanschauung that leaves half of human nature out of account.“

— Colin Wilson author 1931 - 2013

p 219-220
New Pathways In Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972)

Health, Law, Music, Literature

„Pliny had no theoretical opinions of his own concerning changes of the earth's surface… But his enumeration of the new islands which had been formed in the Mediterranean, and of other convulsions, shows that the ancients had not been inattentive observers of the changes which had taken place on the earth within the memory of man.“

— Charles Lyell, book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 22
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Memory, Change

„I understand the world through music and I believe that music shapes the universe. Mankind has always had a sense of wonder about space, has always been curious. It's something that's implanted in us. It's natural to want to travel and discover. It is, always has been, and is always going to be like this. We are space.“

— Vangelis Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music 1943

2001

World, Music, Travel, Understanding

„Great changes have come over the world since Lafayette first came here desirous of aiding the cause of freedom. His efforts in behalf of an American republic have been altogether successful. In no other country in the world was economic opportunity for the people ever so great as it is here. In no other country was it ever possible in a like degree to secure equality and justice for all. Just as he was passing off the stage, the British adopted their reform measures giving them practically representative government. His own France has long since been welcomed into the family of republics. Many others have taken a like course. The cause of freedom has been triumphant. We believe it to be, likewise, the cause of peace. But peace must have other guarantees than constitutions and covenants. Laws and treaties may help, but peace and war are attitudes of mind. American citizens, with the full sympathy of our Government, have been attempting with apparent success to restore stricken Europe.“

— Calvin Coolidge American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929) 1872 - 1933

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

War, People, World, Family

„In the first place, it should be admitted that every possible attempt to bring about union between Hindus and Muslims has been made and that all of them have failed.“

— Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary, social ref… 1891 - 1956

Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

„We have to give a sense of economic liberation to the masses and for that, I think the basic thing we have done or we attempted to do, in the beginning, and we have not yet completed that process, is that of land reforms. I think some of the Indian states have been successful in bringing about land reforms but to get a sensation of economic empowerment in society, even a bit of land of their own, is necessary for the common people and it has been shown by Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, which have achieved remarkable economic successes, that land reform was one basic prior thing they did.“

— K. R. Narayanan 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India 1920 - 2005

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

People, Thinking, Sense, Success

„Gloria Estefan was a huge influence for me. Of course, she was one of the few Latina women around who had this major international success. She sang in Spanish and English, and she was very much the sort of woman I recognised from my culture. I go to her home, and I think that she is a woman who has got it just right. She has her music, she has her family, she has her relationship. I admire her so much because she has always put her family before everything. All her priorities are in place and she is still an amazingly creative artist.“

— Gloria Estefan Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada 1957

comment by "close friend" Jennifer Lopez, arts.guardian.co.uk (March 30, 2007)
2007, 2008

Women, Family, Music, Home

„Liszt has never needed revival; his music has always been an important part of the concert repertoire. Nevertheless, he has appeared to need rehabilitation.“

— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 8 : Liszt: On Creation as Performance

Music, Appearance, Parting

„Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seem to be beside the point—even when the attribution is authoritative, even when it is made by the composer himself.“

— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 3 : Explaining the Obvious

Music

„Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.“

— Jane Austen, book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Men, Books, Education

„Islam is a very powerful but still an undirected force in politics. As a possible factor in international politics, the present prognosis is not very favorable. There have been many attempts at a pan-Islamic policy, none of which has made much progress. One reason for their lack of success is that those who have made the attempt have been so unconvincing. This still leaves the possibility of a more convincing leadership, and there is ample evidence in virtually all Muslim countries of the deep yearning for such a leadership and a readiness to respond to it. The lack of an educated modern leadership has so far restricted the scope of Islam and inhibited religious movements from being serious contenders for power. But it is already very effective as a limiting factor and may yet become a powerful domestic political force if the right kind of leadership emerges.“

— Bernard Lewis British-American historian 1916 - 2018

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

Education, Success, Country

„In his work a means of escape has been found from outmoded romanticism on the one hand and from a barren objectivity on the other.“

— Jean Sibelius Finnish composer of the late Romantic period 1865 - 1957

Neville Cardus in the Manchester Guardian, 1935; reprinted in his The Delights of Music (1966) p. 56.
Criticism

„He is terribly rare. He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled.“

— Fred Astaire American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter 1899 - 1987

George Balanchine in Nabokov, Ivan and Carmichael, Elizabeth. "Balanchine, An Interview". Horizon, January 1961, pp. 44-56. (M).

Music, Knowledge, Time, Dance

„I presume that few who have paid any attention to the history of the Mathematical Analysis, will doubt that it has been developed in a certain order, or that that order has been, to a great extent, necessary -- being determined, either by steps of logical deduction, or by the successive introduction of new ideas and conceptions, when the time for their evolution had arrived.“

— George Boole English mathematician, philosopher and logician 1815 - 1864

Source: 1850s, A treatise on differential equations (1859), p. v; cited in: Quotations by George Boole http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Quotations/Boole.html, MacTutor History of Mathematics, August 2010.

History, Mathematics, Idea, Time

„There is no denying the fact that Ziyauddin had his prejudices, his weaknesses and his handicaps…. But after all these decuctions have been made, the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi remains the greatest book that has survived to us from the Sultanate period. Its eminence in this respect is unchallengable; and so long as the history of India is studied, Barani cannot be ignored…“

— Ziauddin Barani Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357) 1285 - 1357

K.S. Lal, Studies in Medieval Indian History, 1966

Study, Books, History

Charles Rosen69

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