
Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie with Selections from his correspondence Ed. Tom Taylor , Ticknor & Fields, Boston 1860
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie with Selections from his correspondence Ed. Tom Taylor , Ticknor & Fields, Boston 1860
Kozinn, Allan (January 24, 2009). "George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/arts/music/24perle.html, New York Times.
See: Alban Berg
The Listening Composer
“I only composed and experimented for myself and not to please anyone else.”
Amiga Music Preservation interview, 2006
Heifetz official web site http://www.jaschaheifetz.com/about/quotes.html
Gramophone
Context: I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that -- its humanity.
“I like composing music, but I love being with my family.”
Autobiography of Values (1978)
Context: I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves? … As one identity, I was born in AD 1902. But as AD twentieth-century man, I am billions of years old. The life I consider as myself has existed though past eons with unbroken continuity. Individuals are custodians of the life stream — temporal manifestations of far greater being, forming from and returning to their essence like so many dreams. … I recall standing on the edge of a deep valley in the Hawaiian island of Maui, thinking that the life stream is like a mountain river — springing from hidden sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending, evolving in the shape momentarily seen. It is molecules probing through time, found smooth-flowing, adjusted to shaped and shaping banks, roiled by rocks and tree trunks — composed again. Now it ends, apparently, at a lava brink, a precipitous fall.
Near the fall's brink, I saw death as death cannot be seen. I stared at the very end of life, and at life that forms beyond, at the fact of immortality. Dark water bent, broke, disintegrated, transformed to apparition — a tall, stately ghost soul emerged from body, and the finite individuality of the whole becomes the infinite individuality of particles. Mist drifted, disappeared in air, a vanishing of spirit. Far below in the valley, I saw another river, reincarnated from the first, its particles reorganized to form a second body. It carried the same name. It was similar in appearance. It also ended at a lava brink. Flow followed fall, and fall followed flow as I descended the mountainside. The river was mortal and immortal as life, as becoming.