Quotes about harmonize (116 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“All the loving acts that two human beings are capable of, the simple act of holding hands can often become the most intimate. Why is this so? Basically, because the nature of the hands and feet is such that the energy system finds expression in these two parts of the body in a very singular way. Two palms coming together have far more intimacy than the contact between any other parts of the body. You can try this with yourself. You don’t even need a partner. When you put your hands together, the two energy dimensions within you (right-left, masculine-feminine, solar-lunar, yin-yang, etc.) are linked in a certain way, and you begin to experience a sense of unity within yourself. This is the logic of the traditional Indian namaskar. It is a means of harmonizing the system. So, the simplest way to experience a state of union is to try this simple namaskar yoga. Put your hands together, and pay loving attention to any object you use or consume, or any form of life that you encounter. When you bring this sense of awareness into every simple act, your experience of life will never be the same again. There is even a possibility that if you put your hands together, you could unite the world!”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Love , Life , World , Way

“It’s something very few actors really get to experience. When you’re a character actor or voiceover guy, it’s job to job. You’re like a migrant worker, almost. The longevity [of “SpongeBob”] is an unbelievable statistical anomaly. It’s like, I didn’t buy that many lottery tickets and I won the lottery. It’s a totally random, harmonic convergence of people you met and your agent getting you an audition. Actors have so little control over their own lives; it’s nice to have something you’re not in control of that’s actually positive. There was a point when “SpongeBob” was cancelled after the first few seasons and the first movie. We went to a wrap party that I thought was the season wrap party but was the series wrap party. Nobody knew. So I already feel like I dodged a bullet.”

Tom Kenny (1962) American actor

Interview: Tom Kenny talks voicing SpongeBob Squarepants and 'Mr. Show' http://www.metro.us/entertainment/interview-tom-kenny-talks-voicing-spongebob-squarepants-and-mr-show/zsJoba---UspN3mmMXb2BE (February 2, 2015)

People , Guy , Feeling , Season

“I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.”

Charlie Parker (1920–1955) American jazz saxophonist and composer

c. 1939 quoted in Masters of Jazz

“A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy.”

Walter Gropius (1883–1969) German architect (1883-1969) and founder of the Bauhaus School

In 'The Observer' (London), 'Sayings of the Week'

Democracy

“To manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to coordinate and to control. To foresee and plan means examining the future and drawing up the plan of action. To organize means building up the dual structure, material and human, of the undertaking. To command means binding together, unifying and harmonizing all activity and effort. To control means seeing that everything occurs in conformity with established rule and expressed demand.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Henri Fayol (1916) cited in: Russell C. Swansburg (1996) Management and Leadership for Nurse Managers, p. 1

Effort , Future , Drawing

“A totalitarian state will harmonize in Spain the operation of all the capabilities and energy in the country, that inside the National Unity, the work esteemed as the most unavoidable must be the only exponent of the people's will.”

Francisco Franco (1892–1975) Spanish general and dictator

Un estado totalitario armonizará en España el funcionamiento de todas las capacidades y energías del país, que dentro de la Unidad Nacional, el trabajo estimado como el más ineludible de los deberes será el único exponente de la voluntad popular.
Victory speech in Madrid (19 May 1939), quoted in Espana Nuevo Siglo‎ (1997) by Tim Connell and Juan Kattán-Ibarra, p. 174

People , Country

“Never fear, true hearts! A people which has shown the quality of its genius as this nation has in the last four years will finish its work. It will go forward and not backward. For our America shall be the Sinai of the nations, and from the terrible thunders and lightnings of its great struggle shall proceed the divine law of liberty that shall subdue and harmonize the world.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

People , World , Fear , Law

“My solos are speech-influenced rhythmically; and harmonically, they're either pentatonic, or poly-scale oriented. And there's the mixolydian mode that I also use a lot…But I'm more interested in melodic things I think the biggest challenge when you go to play a solo is trying to invent a melody on the spot.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

As quoted in The Guitar Handbook (2002) by Ralph Denyer, p. 102

Thinking

“It has always seemed to me that the social order was implicit in the very nature of things, and required nothing more from the human spirit than care in arranging the various elements; that a people could be governed without being made thralls or libertines or victims thereby; that man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.”

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794) military and political leader

J’ai pensé que l’ordre social était dans la nature même des choses, et n’empruntait de l’esprit humain que le soin d’en mettre à leur place les éléments divers; qu’un peuple pouvait être gouverné sans être assujetti, sans être licencieux, et sans être opprimé; que l’homme naissait pour la paix et pour la liberté, et n’était malheureux et corrompu que par les lois insidieuses de la domination. Alors j’imaginai que si l’on donnait à l’homme des lois selon la nature et son cœur, il cesserait d’être malheureux et corrompu.
Discours sur la Constitution à donner à la France http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/discours/stjust_constitution_24_04_93.htm, speech to the National Convention (April 24, 1793).

People , Peace , Law , Nature

“You & James Ferdinand simply can't learn to distinguish betwixt intellectual opinion & irrelevant instinctive emotion... For instance, he has the idea that I place an exaggerated intellectual valuation on the 18th century merely because my chance emotions have given me a strong but irrational subjective sense of belonging to it. I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellectual brief for Georgian days... He can't understand my ability to class as merely one period among others an age to which random early impressions have so closely bound my emotions & sense of identity... the point is that my own personal mess of subjective emotions has nothing whatever to do with my intellectual opinions. I have freely declared myself at all times (like everybody else in his respective way) a mere product of my background, & do not consider the values of that background as applicable to outsiders. The only way for the individual to achieve any contentment or harmonic relationship to a pattern is to adhere to the background naturally his; & that is what I am doing. Others I urge to adhere to their own respective backgrounds & traditions, however remote from mine these may be. When I venture now & then to suggest values of a more general kind, I approach the problem in an entirely different way—speaking not as Old Theobald of His Majesty's Rhode-Island Colony, but as the cosmic & impersonal Ec'h-Pi-El, denizen of the invisible world 'Ui-ulh in the second zone of curved space outside angled space... If there is any approach to an absolute value in the cosmos—or at least on this planet—then this is it. Sincerity—is-or-isn't-ness—technical perfection—harmony—coherence—consistency—symmetry—all these things are obviously aspects of one single property of space, energy, & general mathematical harmonics whose universality gives it the deepest possible significance. I have thought this all my life, & that is why to me one Newton or Einstein, one M. Atilius Regulus, M. Porcius Cato, or P. Cornelius Scipio, seems to me in certain ways worth a full dozen of your prattling little Keatses & Baudelaires.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 312
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life , Age , World , Way

“The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

Source: (1932), pp. 27-28

Life , Motivation

“The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consistent and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only "good guys" in it, or eating cottage cheese.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989)

Guy

“Man, the period of whose life is one hundred years, should practice Dharma, Artha, and Kama at different times and in such a manner that they may harmonize, and not clash in any way. He should acquire learning in his childhood; in his youth and middle age he should attend to Artha and Kama, and in his old age he should perform Dharma, and thus seek to gain Moksha, that is, release from further transmigration.”

Vātsyāyana book Kama Sutra

Source: Kama Sutra, p. 13

Life , Youth , Age , Way

“Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions. The beings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or to give the heat of their bodies. It is right that the sum total of work should be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands. It is just that the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength of women.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light

Women , Men , Fate

“For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

Speech on quantum theory at Celebrazione del Secondo Centenario della Nascita di Luigi Galvani, Bologna, Italy (October 1937)

Problem , Science

“Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, "Quotation".
Misattributed, Isaac D'Israeli

“First of all, this is Duke's band, and this is Tchaikovsky. Knowing things in their original sources, I abhor taking a concert thing and trying to treat it in a jazz light. In the beginning they have a very nice orchestral usage, but the minute they start going into Johnny Hodges and 4/4, it just doesn't fit. It comes out neither fowl nor fish. The orchestration is enjoyable because, for one reason, they've done a nice job of getting nice, legitimate, straight-sounding things. The melodies are very lovely, but, of course, Duke is the master in this type of thing. But over-all, from a jazz standpoint, I don't appreciate it at all. If I didn't know it was Tchaikovsky, for instance, with the tambourine bit and all, I would feel it was straight out of an MGM Arabian movie. The harmonies he used, particularly some of the background things, interested me more than the melodies, probably because the harmonic part of music interests me more than any. From an orchestrational standpoint I would give this somewhere around 3½ stars; but from a jazz standpoint, none.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing "Arabesque Cookie" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJtWZ771OqA from Ellington's The Nutcracker Suite; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe by Leonard Feather, in Downbeat (October 25, 1962), p. 39

Love , Music , Feeling , Star

“in English: I do not consider myself a musician, rather a radar ready to pick up the symphonies coming from the sky. It's been like that since I was four years old and I hope it will continue forever. When I compose, any ingredient can be good, the problem lies in the proportions that must be harmonized. It's like the work of architects, you never invent anything.”

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

1989

Hope , Problem

“To start, we will consider a single particle moving in three space dimensions under the influence of a general central potential. Later we will specialize to the case of a Coulomb potential, and work out the spectrum of hydrogen. One other classic problem, the harmonic oscillator, will be treated at the end of this chapter.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 2: Particle States in a Central Potential

Problem

“We humans are conflicted beings. Our beliefs don't always harmonize with our instincts, and our behavior doesn't always reflect our beliefs…. We wage war between the person we are and the person we hope to become.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

War , Hope , Behavior , Personality

“The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the music breathing from her face, 19
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,—
And oh, that eye was in itself a soul!”

George Gordon Byron book The Bride of Abydos

Canto I, Stanza 6; this can be compared to: "The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love", Thomas Gray, The Progress of Poesy I. 3, line 16; also: "Oh, could you view the melody / Of every grace / And music of her face", Richard Lovelace, Orpheus to Beasts; "There is music in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument", Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Part ii, Section ix.
The Bride of Abydos (1813)

Love , Music , Soul , Light

“Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Last paragraph of section III of Antidotes for fear, page 122 (see link at top of the section)
1960s, Strength to Love (1963)
Source: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

Peaceful , Love , Life

“For any exam in history, here is the answer: all human history is the struggle between systems that attempt to shackle the human personality in the name of some intangible good on the one hand and systems that enable and expand the scope of human personality in the pursuit of extremely tangible aims. The American system is the most successful in the world because it harmonizes best with the aims and longings of human personality while allowing the best protection to other personalities.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

How to Ace an Exam, The American Spectator, 15 December 2004 http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7511,], 2006-11-19]

World , History , Success , Personality

“In this world, everything has a pulse or a vibration. This sound is unique to each living or non-living thing and in itself creates a music that no-one can hear. I believe that this has a very powerful resonance with, and a deep effect on, our lives. What would happen if we took this further and applied it to bigger things, more powerful things; like an entire solar system or galaxy say, what would that sound like?
Musica Universalis is the ancient theory that every celestial body, the sun, the moon and the stars, has an inner music. This is a harmonic and mathematical concept derived from the movements of the planets in the solar system. The music created is inaudible to the human ear.
Music of the Spheres is my interpretation of this theory. Every planet and every star; the whole universe has music within it that no-one can hear. This is what it would sound like if it was set free. This is Music of the Spheres.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

from the introduction to Music of the Spheres

World , Music , Star , Mathematics

“Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

“The Doctrine of Fascism” (1935 version), Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, p. 15
1930s

“Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.”

Taisen Deshimaru (1914–1982) Japanese Buddhist monk

As quoted in Zen and the Art of Systems Analysis : Meditations on Computer Systems Development (2002) by Patrick McDermott, p. xix

Way

“The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the sonority in different ways.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002), Ch. 1 Body and Mind

Way

“But, good God, what is this when compared with that deep and true music of the wise, whereby the proportions of natural things are investigated, the harmonical concord and the qualities of the whole world are revealed, by which also connected things are bound together, peace established between conflicting elements, and whereby each star is perpetually suspended in its appointed place by its weight and strength, and by the harmony of its lucent spirit”

Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Waite (1887, p. 291)

God , World , Peace , Music

“Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.”

Edward Elgar (1857–1934) English composer

Anthony Burgess in The Observer, 1983; reprinted in his Homage to Qwert Yuiop (London: Abacus, 1987) p. 567.
Criticism

“It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. The latter can serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life only if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Life , Dependency

“Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots. …Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard. …harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Art , Music

“My main orientation is harmonic. Bill, besides having the harmonic structures that he did, had a control of the dynamic level of the piano and pedaling, which is ridiculously fantastic. I never saw a man make so many gradations from pianissimo to piano in my life. I can't do that. On the other hand, I think that what I do harmonically is somewhere other than where he was.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Radio interview, circa 1985, by Ben Sidran, as quoted in Talking Jazz With Ben Sidran, Volume 1: The Rhythm Section https://books.google.com/books?id=O3hZDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT453 (1992, 2006, 2014)

Life , Thinking

“Some… agreeing with Philolaus, believe that the proportion is called harmonic because it attends upon all geometric harmony, and they say that 'geometric harmony' is the cube because it is harmonized in all three dimensions, being the product of a number thrice multiplied together. For in every cube this proportion is mirrored; there are in every cube 12 sides, 8 angles and 6 faces; hence 8, the [harmonic] mean between 6 and 12, is according to harmonic proportion…”

Nicomachus (60–120) Ancient Greek mathematician

this harmonic proportion may be expressed as <math>\frac{12}{6}=\frac{12-8}{8-6}</math> or inversely.
Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic (1926)

“The trends that produced Schumann’s early piano works started out not so much from Weber’s refined brilliance as from Schubert’s more intimate and deeply soul-searching idiom. His creative imagination took him well beyond the harmonic sequences known until his time. He looked at the fugues and canons of earlier composers and discovered in them a Romantic principle. In the interweaving of the voices, the essence of counterpoint found its parallel in the mysterious relationships between the human psyche and exterior phenomena, which Schumann felt impelled to express. Schubert’s broad melodic lyricism has often been contrasted with Schumann’s terse, often quickly repeated motifs, and by comparison Schumann is often erroneously seen as short-winded. Yet it is precisely with these short melodic formulae that he shone his searchlight into the previously unplumbed depths of the human psyche. With them, in a complex canonic web, he wove a dense tissue of sound capable of taking in and reflecting back all the poetical character present. His actual melodies rarely have an arioso form; his harmonic system combines subtle chromatic progressions, suspensions, a rapid alternation of minor and major, and point d’orgue. The shape of Schumann’s scores is characterized by contrapuntal lines, and can at first seem opaque or confused. His music is frequently marked by martial dotted rhythms or dance-like triple time signatures. He loves to veil accented beats of the bar by teasingly intertwining two simultaneous voices in independent motion. This highly inde-pendent instrumental style is perfectly attuned to his own particular compositional idiom. After a period in which the piano had indulged in sensuous beauty of sound and brilliant coloration, in Schumann it again became a tool for conveying poetic monologues in musical terms.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Love , Beauty , Music , Color

“The Anarchists believe in the State; only they insist that the greater part, if not all, of the necessity for its existence is the result of an artificial limitation of the freedom of civil society, and that the completion of industrial freedom may one day so harmonize individuals that it will no longer be necessary to provide a guarantee of political freedom.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Liberty and Politics

Freedom , Parting

“Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her. He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing situations trying to do so (“Zakalwe,” she would say when he tried to explain some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck and stare out from the rambunctious black tangle of her hair. “You have serious problems.””

Iain Banks Culture series

She would smile), But the feelings, the acts, the structure of the two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only forced him deeper into his confusion.
Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (pp. 144-145).

Love , War , Pleasure , Smile

“One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them…these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension—between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see—is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain—or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create?—are the ones found in the world around us.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), pp. 470-471

Pleasure , World , Law , Way

“Lambert, who admired Duke Ellington and proclaimed his harmonic roots in Frederick Delius (who in his turn had taken them from Debussy), was a fearless reconciler of what the academies and Tin Pan Alley alike presumed to be eternally opposed…In 1972, on a plane from New York to Toronto, I found myself sitting next to Duke Ellington, who spoke almost with tears in his eyes of the stature of Lambert.”

Constant Lambert (1905–1951) British composer and conductor

Anthony Burgess Little Wilson and Big God ([1987] 1988) pp. 110-11.
Criticism

Tear

“My brothers and my sisters, do always persevere in true and earnest prayer, and the Lord will hear you. Believe that the highest revelations of science are conformable to the doctrine of the efficacy of prayer; that in this doctrine the highest philosophy harmonizes with the purest devotion.”

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) Indian academic

Sermon at Hackney Unitarian Church, London, on 24th April 1870.

Sister , Science , Perseverance

“We have to harmonize the two facts, that wealth is good and necessary, and that wealth is a danger to its possessor and to society. On the one hand property is indispensable to personal freedom, to all higher individuality, and to self-realization; the right to property is a corollary of the right to life; without property men are at the mercy of nature and in bondage to those who have property. On the other hand property is used as a means of collecting tribute and private taxes, as a club with which to extort unearned gain from laborers and consumers, and as the fundamental tool of oppression.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: The Social Principles of Jesus (1918), p. 127

Life , Men , Nature , Freedom

“To impact someone emotionally, [a musical piece] has to contain "interesting" melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content, and what defines "interesting" is up to the listener.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Music

“When I first heard the songs of Mario Ruiz Armengol I responded in awe at the totality of their musical expression. Mario's harmonic sense was one that I had never encountered in most Latin music; melodies which in themselves were distinctive and lingered in your mind after only one hearing; profound emotional content without being hyper-romantic in conception. Some of them seemed almost brooding in character, filled with a feeling of melancholia and reflecting the depth of his personality.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

From the liner notes for Cal Tjader Plays the Contemporary Music of Mexico and Brazil (September 1962)

Music , Feeling , Sense , Personality

“To be like Christ in His love is far more than to be like Him in His knowlege, if we were forced to choose between them; but they harmonize and strengthen each other; more knowledge will help us to love more; and more love help us to know more.”

Arthur Kenney (1776–1855) Irish dean

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 396.

Love , Knowledge , Help , Christ

“Modern man … when he looks at his daily newspaper … sees the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens. The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forbear of the thirteenth century—whom he pities for sitting in medieval darkness—think of questioning the cosmology. This modern man, too, lives under a dome, whose theoretical aspect has been made to harmonize with a materialistic conception of the world. And he employs its conjunctions and oppositions to explain the occurrences of his time with all the confidence of the now supplanted discipline of astrology.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 93-94.

World , Color , Confidence , Question

“Music is nothing but ratios and harmonic math, anyways.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Static Line interview, 1998

Music

“Allah executed and rendered justice for the sake of putting together and harmonization of the hearts.”

Fatimah (604–632) daughter of Muhammad and Khadijah

Ayan al-Shī‘ah, vol.1, p. 316.
Religious Wisdom

Justice , Heart

“I think men of science as well as other men need to learn from Christ, and I think Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that their view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable. But I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonize his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself, and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society.”

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Scottish physicist

Draft of a reply to an invitation to join the Victoria Institute (1875), in Ch. 12 : Cambridge 1871 To 1879, p. 404
The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (1882)

Men , God , Thinking , Study

“Impart additional strength to our happy Union. Diversified as are the interests of its various parts, how admirably do they harmonize and blend together! We have only to make a proper use of the bounties spread before us, to render us prosperous and powerful.”

Henry Clay (1777–1852) American politician from Kentucky

Speech on the Increase of the Navy, House of Representatives (22 January 1812).

Parting , Happiness

“The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.”

Sidney Coleman (1937–2007) American physicist

Said during one of his lectures at Harvard University http://www.physics.harvard.edu/about/Phys253.html.

“Revolutionary tactics must harmonize with revolutionary principles. We could better hope to succeed with reactionary principles and revolutionary tactics than with revolutionary principles and reactionary tactics.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Sound Socialist Tactics (1912)

Hope

“Nolan Ryan is simply a flame-thrower. They call him The Express. Get it? Ryan's Express. Harmon Killebrew says if he ever gets hit by Ryan's express, he'll have the pitcher arrested for manslaughter. Oakland slugger Reggie Jackson says Ryan is the only pitcher he's afraid of, down-deep-in-the-guts afraid of. "If a pitch ever gets away from him, he will kill someone." Nolan Ryan pitches for the California Angels, in Anaheim, which you also wouldn't confuse with New York. Thus, few people really know what an exciting young man this is, perhaps the most exciting single performer in baseball today. Yes, I've heard of Hank Aaron. For years I beat the drums, by myself, for Roberto Clemente. I like the cool gall of Vida Blue, the hot moxie of Pete Rose. They all excite me. But not down deep in the guts, the way this kid does. He excites me. He frightens me. He puts me on that double-pronged fork of attraction and revulsion. When you watch Nolan Ryan rear and throw that screaming blur of white toward the plate, you don't know whether to watch or cover your eyes. Will he strike out the hitter, or will he strike him dead?”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Nolan Ryan: The Untouchable," in Baseball Stars of 1973 (March 1973), edited by Ray Robinson, p. 92
Sports-related

People , Angels , Way , Dead

“I wasn't motivated to do it [re-record Bach's Goldberg Variations] until rather recently, when it occurred to me, on one of my rare relistenings to that early recording, that it was very nice, but that it was perhaps a little bit like thirty very interesting but somewhat independent-minded pieces, going their own way, and all making a comment on the ground bass on which they are all formed and to which they all conform. And I suddenly felt, not having played it in, well, since I stopped playing concerts, about 20 years, having not played it in all that time, that maybe I wasn't savaged by any over-exposure to it, and that if I looked at it again, I could find a way of making some sort of almost arithmetical correspondence between the theme and the subsequent variations, so that there would be some sort of temporal relationship, I don't want to say just exactly 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, that kind of correspondence, but, you know what I mean, there would be a sense in which, substituting for the fact that Bach had absolutely no melodic design that is continuous but rather a base harmonic design that is continuous, there would be at least a rhythmic design that is continuous, and the sense of pulse that went through it. And that seemed to me sufficient justification […] to do it all over again.”

Glenn Gould (1932–1982) Canadian pianist

transcribed from The Glenn Gould Collection vol 13 (Sony laserdisc).

Way , Motivation , Sense , Time

“Because of the limited keyboard. This is a very strange thing. When I play the piano, I get clear down to the left edge of the piano. Now, unlike Art Tatum, I don't take runs that go up, that always end up on the extreme high "C". But I really do like the low end. Even as an organist, it has bothered me that the keyboards are five octaves and stop at "C". I've always wished that my pedal board went down to "F". My harmonic thinking gets involved clear down to that "F" and to be cut off at the "C". I can't explain it. It's as if somebody were standing right next to you while you were playing and you just kept having the feeling like: "I can't go there; I can't go there."”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

It does something to me. Whereby [sic] having the full keyboard just opens up a world of things to me.
On his preference for Yamaha's 88-key PF-15 piano over the then prevalent DX7; radio interview, circa 1985, by Ben Sidran, as quoted in Talking Jazz With Ben Sidran, Volume 1: The Rhythm Section https://books.google.com/books?id=O3hZDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT457&dq=%22because+of+the+limited+keyboard%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOhaCoxMXRAhXB5iYKHcvbBykQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (1992, 2006, 2014)

World , Art , Feeling , Thinking

“Is it not plain that the law of good will has a universal application? There is no event, no act, no word, no supreme crisis of life in which man may let the good will go, and turn on the forces of ill will, egotism, and selfishness. Letting the good will go out of him, he lapses straightway into the child or the savage. Keeping the flow of the serene good will in his soul, he walks the earth, fearless, erect, with God’s sunshine on his face. To live thus is the essence of civilization; the individual and the social welfare are thus secured and harmonized. To live thus is practical religion; the more thoroughly we try, test, and experience it, the more completely it will be found to grow out of, and to illustrate, a Theology, that is, a divine plan of the universe. This Theology matches the needs of civilized men in a civilized world.”

Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927) Unitarian minister, speaker, and writer

The Theology of Civilization (May 1899)

Life , Men , God , World

“As we all know, the singularity in the art of Bach is the fusion of both levels and lines, the horizontal and vertical line. It’s a real wonder to see that the creation and forming of the horizontal line, the polyphonic structure, also results in this perfect, beautiful vertical line, the harmonic line. As we also know, Bach already used the full harmonic range and radius as no composer before him. My artistic aim of course is to point out the horizontal line in soloistic manner in a dynamically elastic way, but in the same breath to form the harmonic line in a bright field of color (I would call it “harmonic articulation”), to achieve a particular atmosphere of emotions and moods, drama, velocity, vividness, and so on. As we can imagine, these are high demands …”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Beauty , Art , Color , Way

“The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct is its appeal. In any composition the material side may be more or less omitted in proportion as the forms used are more or less material, and for them substituted pure abstractions, or largely dematerialized objects. The more an artist uses these abstracted forms, the deeper and more confidently will he advance into the kingdom of the abstract. And after him will follow the gazer at his pictures, who also will have gradually acquired a greater familiarity with the language of that kingdom.
Must we then abandon utterly all material objects and paint solely in abstractions? The problem of harmonizing the appeal of the material and the non-material shows us the answer to this question. As every word spoken rouses an inner vibration, so likewise does every object represented. To deprive oneself of this possibility is to limit one's powers of expression. That is at any rate the case at present. But besides this answer to the question, there is another, and one which art can always employ to any question beginning with "must": There is no "must" in art, because art is free.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

VI. The language of Form and Colour
1910 - 1915, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911

Art , Confidence , Question , Problem

“They [great works of literature] are invalidated not because of their literary obsolescence. Some of these images pertain to contemporary literature and survive in its most advanced creations. What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content—their truth. In this transformation, they find their home in everyday living. The alien and alienating oeuvres of intellectual culture become familiar goods and services. Is their massive reproduction and consumption only a change in quantity, namely, growing appreciation and understanding, democratization of culture? The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a “higher” order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction—the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 60-61

Truth , World , Hope , Art

“The charge that Luther adapted the translation to his theological opinions has become traditional in the Roman Church, and is repeated again and again by her controversialists and historians.
In both cases, the charge has some foundation, but no more than the counter-charge which may be brought against Roman Catholic Versions.
The most important example of dogmatic influence in Luther's version is the famous interpolation of the word alone in Rom. 3:28 (allein durch den Glauben), by which he intended to emphasize his solifidian doctrine of justification, on the plea that the German idiom required the insertion for the sake of clearness. But he thereby brought Paul into direct verbal conflict with James, who says (James 2:24), "by works a man is justified, and not only by faith" ("nicht durch den Glauben allein"). It is well known that Luther deemed it impossible to harmonize the two apostles in this article, and characterized the Epistle of James as an "epistle of straw," because it had no evangelical character ("keine evangelische Art").
He therefore insisted on this insertion in spite of all outcry against it. His defense is very characteristic. "If your papist," he says,
The Protestant and anti-Romish character of Luther's New Testament is undeniable in his prefaces, his discrimination between chief books and less important books, his change of the traditional order, and his unfavorable judgments on James, Hebrews, and Revelation. It is still more apparent in his marginal notes, especially on the Pauline Epistles, where he emphasizes throughout the difference between the law and the gospel, and the doctrine of justification by faith alone; and on the Apocalypse, where he finds the papacy in the beast from the abyss (Rev. 13), and in the Babylonian harlot (Rev. 17). The anti-papal explanation of the Apocalypse became for a long time almost traditional in Protestant commentaries.
There is, however, a gradual progress in translation, which goes hand in hand with the progress of the understanding of the Bible. Jerome's Vulgate is an advance upon the Itala, both in accuracy and Latinity; the Protestant Versions of the sixteenth century are an advance upon the Vulgate, in spirit and in idiomatic reproduction; the revisions of the nineteenth century are an advance upon the versions of the sixteenth, in philological and historical accuracy and consistency. A future generation will make a still nearer approach to the original text in its purity and integrity. If the Holy Spirit of God shall raise the Church to a higher plane of faith and love, and melt the antagonisms of human creeds into the one creed of Christ, then, and not before then, may we expect perfect versions of the oracles of God.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

How Luther's theology may have influenced his translating

Love , God , Books , Faith

“p>One translucent day I leave the city
to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning,
ancient temples ruined by time,
streams that creep alone through the dark
past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests
where long processions, lost souls of Champa,
march; and evening spills through thick,
fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies
were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls.
Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred
to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest
in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward,
their light chatter floating
with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces,
temples that blaze in cerulean skies.
Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder
of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli,
the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh
as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced,
their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago
and still I am obsessed,
my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow
for the race of Champa.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"On the Way Home", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 167; quoted in full in Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam by Thich Thien-an (Tuttle Publishing, 1992)

Men , Dreams , Way , Home

“Christ's divinity accounts for His exaltation to the right hand of God, justifies the worship of angels and the confidence of mankind. It makes clear His right to the throne of the universe, and enables the mind to understand why He is exalted in providence, in grace, and in judgment. It is the unifying truth that harmonizes all other teachings of Christianity, and renders the entire system symmetrical and complete.”

George C. Lorimer (1838–1904) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 57.

God , Truth , Angels , Confidence

“The bases of music are rhythm and harmony. Rhythm is ordered recurrence in time… As the planets move around the sun, they repeat their orbits periodically; thus there is already a primitive kind of rhythm in their motion…. Harmony… can be considered a special kind of rhythm…. pure musical tones are produced when the vibrations are… periodic or… repeat themselves regularly in time. Two tones harmonize if their intervals of repetition are in rhythm—or, in mathematical language, if their periods are in proportion. Kepler… in the third book of Harmonice mundi… attempted to make other… related, connections between musical harmony and mathematical proportion.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Books , Music , Mathematics , Time

“The topic that I have attempted to explore is the usefulness of these notions of the engineer, about feeds-back, harmonic components and the like, in application to the analogous problems of economic fluctuation and economic regulation.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. v

Problem

“The struggle begins, to harmonize canvas, eye, hand, forms. New apparitions stalk the earth.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Karel Appel's excerpt', c. 1953

“That's five stars to start with. That's five stars to start with. That's Gil Evans, isn't it? The only thing that disturbed me about this—the whole thing, in its entirety, was tremendously satisfying: performance, orchestration is good, the harmonic usage is beautiful, the contrasting texture of orchestra, the whole thing is just great—but there are certain sections there when the background was so lovely it just seemed like the alto saxophone was out of place. Now this is the type of thing that just makes me smile. I enjoy every minute of it. I don't have to go for a "peak" and then think about something else while I'm listening. Gil Evans' writing, to me, is such a boon that when he came along with the Miles Ahead album, I was thankful, because since about the Stan Kenton Orchestra of 1952, where the writing had been very good, between Mulligan and Rugolo and the whole works, between those periods there had been a void, a retrogression back to the roots, and this took writing back to a standpoint which just wasn't interesting. So when Evans came along, I just flipped.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing Evans' arrangement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4dcHdoR4k of Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca,", from New Bottle, Old Wine; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe

Love , Smile , Beauty , Star

“The European Union is not, in fact, a union at all, but a continent-wide political coup. What began as a common market has now metamorphosed by stealth into a supranational political dictatorship, a parasitical organism living on the backs of the European nation states, sucking their lifeblood and slowly killing them off; a bureaucratic tyranny that wants to "harmonize" out of existence the national identities that have made Europe a continent of genuine diversity and a cultural crucible whose values have shaped the entire western world. But they want to put a stop to all that in the European Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and this is why European laws are never enacted in response to any kind of organic need in society, but as top-down directives intended to impose indiscriminate uniformity for its own sake.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Europe needs a revolution" (25 August 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=s3u9LB32YYM
2011

World , Law

“The entire heaven, making its parts everywhere harmonize with him, is filled with spirits emanating out of the Sun. For this god is ruler of five orbits in the heavens, and whilst traversing three out of these orbits, he produces in three the Graces, themselves three in number, the remaining circles form the Scales to the Balance of supreme Necessity.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

God , Sun , Parting

“Another forerunner of modern organization theorists was Andrew Ure, a professor of chemistry. An enthusiastic proponent of “the factory system,” Ure (1835) took a step beyond Adam Smith. Whereas Smith’s pin factory was solely an example of division of labor, Ure pointed out that a factory poses organizational challenges. He asserted that every factory incorporates “three principles of action, or three organic systems”: (a) a “mechanical” system that integrates production processes, (b) a “moral” system that motivates and satisfies the needs of workers, and (c) a “commercial” system that seeks to sustain the firm through financial management and marketing. Harmonizing these three systems, said Ure, was the responsibility of managers.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Source: "The Origins of Organizational Theory," 2005, p. 149-150

Motivation

“My own supervisor, William Hodge, the creator of the fertile theory of harmonic forms, was not a genius like Ramanujan but resembled Lefschetz.”

Michael Atiyah (1929–2019) British mathematician

[Michael Atiyah, Michael Atiyah Collected Works: Volume 7: 2002-2013, https://books.google.com/books?id=Rm6VAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA286, 3 April 2014, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-968926-2, 286]

“I'm gonna take a wild guess—I think that was Buddy DeFranco, and possibly the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The band strikes me as an enigma, in that, first of all, some interesting harmonic things are happening as far as the individual voicings are concerned, but yet it's played in an older, tighter fashion. For instance, the bass player, if there are chord changes happening every two beats, plays the root for two beats, then the next root for two beats—that type of sound. The harmony, especially in the opening part where the theme is established, is a lot more modern than that kind of band would normally sound. I think that they're playing that way to keep that Miller identity, with that rhythmic tightness”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing DeFranco's arrangement of Billy Strayhorn's "Chelsea Bridge", from the album Glenn Miller Orchestra Under the Direction of Buddy DeFranco; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#2nmgk677qzm4cnu by Leonard Feather, in Downbeat (October 19, 1967), p. 38

Way , Fashion , Thinking , Change

“Without the aid of these, then, it is not possible to deal accurately with the forms of being nor to discover the truth in things, knowledge of which is wisdom, and evidently not even to philosophize properly, for "just as painting contributes to the menial arts toward correctness of theory, so in truth lines, numbers, harmonic intervals, and the revolutions of circles bear aid to the learning of the doctrines of wisdom," says the Pythagorean Androcydes. Likewise Archytas of Tarentum, at the beginning of… On Harmony, says… in about these words: "It seems to me that they do well to study mathematics, and it is not at all strange that they have correct knowledge about each thing, what it is. For if they knew rightly the nature of the whole, they were also likely to see well what is the nature of the parts. About geometry, indeed, and arithmetic and astronomy, they have handed down to us a clear understanding, and not least also about music. For these seem to be sister sciences; for they deal with sister subjects, the first two forms of being."”

Nicomachus (60–120) Ancient Greek mathematician

Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic (1926)

Wisdom , Truth , Art , Music

“To the Greek harmony was of supreme importance, and if the triglyphs represented the harmonic scale… their meaning and use is abundantly explained. …The universal admiration which Greek proportions have always excited proves that the method of obtaining them was correct.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Universe

“My visceral perception of brotherhood harmonizes with our best modern biological knowledge. […] Many people think (or fear) that equality of human races represents a hope of liberal sentimentality probably squashed by the hard realities of history. They are wrong. This essay can be summarized in a single phrase, a motto if you will: Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not true by definition; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Human Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History", p. 186
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

People , Fear , Hope , Way

“It is surprising that so great a mathematician as Dr. Smith could have entertained for a moment, an idea that the vibrations constituting different sounds should be able to cross each other in all directions, without affecting the same individual particles of air by their joint forces: undoubtedly they cross, without disturbing each other's progress; but this can be no otherwise effected than by each particle's partaking of both motions. If this assertion stood in need of any proof, it might be amply furnished by the phenomena of beats, and of the grave harmonics observed…”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

"Outlines of Experiments and Inquiries Respecting Sound and Light" (1800)

Idea

“Treating a being as an end in itself means respecting the value of what makes it such an end. After we see that this value resides in rational nature, we see it implies that, at least in general, rational beings should not be subjected to deception or coercion. Instead, we should seek to harmonize our strivings with those of other rational beings toward their ends.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Nature

“Formerly it frequently happened to me that when questioned regarding a picture I simply did not know what it represented. I had not seen the subject, so to say. Now I have also included the content so that I know most of the time what is represented. But this only supports my experience that what matters in the ultimate end is the abstract meaning of harmonization”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

note from a letter, 1903
Quote from a letter (1903), as cited in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 443
1903 - 1910

Question , Support , Time

“We are attempting to make our contribution to the peace of the world, not in any sensational or spectacular way but by the application of practical, workable, seasoned methods and an appeal to the common sense of mankind. We do not rely upon the threat of force in our international relations or in our attempt to maintain our position in the world. We have seen force tried, but the more people study its results the more they must be convinced that on the whole it has failed. Conditions sometimes arise where it seems that an appeal to arms is inevitable, but such conflicts decide very little. In the end it is necessary to make an appeal to reason, and until adjustments are reached by covenants which harmonize with the prevailing sense of justice a final solution has not been found.”

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

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

People , World , Peace , Justice

“By the time of his Fourth String Quartet, inversional symmetry had become as fundamental a premise of Bartók's harmonic language as it is of the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Neither he nor they ever realized that this connection establishes a profound affinity between them in spite of the stylistic features that so obviously distinguish his music from theirs…Nowhere does he [Bartók] recognize the communality of his harmonic language with that of the twelve-tone composers that is implied in their shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Pages 46-47
The Listening Composer

Music , Communication , Time

“We notice the movement of automobiles and other beings in the street, but we do not notice that the turning of the earth. We believe that automobiles go at a great speed on a fixed ground; yet the speed of the earth's rotation at the equator is 40,000 km every 24 hours.
As truly serious art must follow the greater laws, and not only appearance, I try to put all the elements in motion in my mobile sculptures. It is a matter of harmonizing these movements, thus arriving at a new possibility for beauty.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

Quote of Calder (8 March 1932), in text 'That which moves - On mobile sculptures', unpubl. MS https://web.archive.org/web/20110222045901/http://calder.org:80/historicaltexts/text/5.html, 1932, Calder Foundation Archives, New York
1930s - 1950s

Law , Beauty , Art , Appearance

“At first we got along very well. Esipova even boasted outside the class that she had pupils who wrote sonatas (I completed Sonata, Op. 1, and played it to Esipova, who took it home and inserted pedaling). But before long trouble began. Esipova’s method of teaching was to try to fit everyone into a standard pattern. True, it was a very elaborate pattern, and if the pupil’s temperament coincided with her own, the results were admirable. But if the pupil happened to be of an independent cast of mind Esipova would do her best to suppress his individuality instead of helping to develop it. Moreover, I had great difficulty in ridding myself of careless playing, and the Mozart, Schubert and Chopin which she insisted on were somehow not in my line. At that period I was too preoccupied with the search for a new harmonic idiom to understand how anyone could care for the simple harmonies of Mozart.”

Anna Yesipova (1851–1914) Russian pianist

Sergei Prokofiev, Autobiography

Home , Search , Understanding , Help

“Johnny has never written a tune – at least none I've ever heard – that wasn't melodically and harmonically perfect.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

As quoted in the liner notes from Songs for Rainy Day Lovers (1967)

Perfection

“When the Morgan and Rockefeller interests harmonized to consummate the great wrong, they well understood that they could not achieve their purpose against a hostile press. Hence they "took over" the newspapers.
This does not necessarily mean the ownership of all newspapers. The perfection of the modern combination is little less than a Fine Art. Here again control is better than outright ownership. And control can be achieved through that community of interests, that interdependence of investment and credits which ties the publisher up to the banks, the advertisers, and special interests.”

Robert M. La Follette Sr. (1855–1925) American politician

"Fooling the People as a Fine Art", La Follette's Magazine (April 1918)

Hostility , Art , Communication , Perfection

“[Committees are] a tool of the democratic, knowledge-pooling, and desire-harmonizing process which cannot be otherwise forwarded. And when committees fail, as they sometimes do, it is because the limits to their role are not clearly understood or because they have not benefited by proper leadership from the chairman.”

Ordway Tead (1891–1973) American academic

Ordway Tead (1935) Creative Management: The Relation of Aims to Administration. p. 39.

Knowledge

“I am Ra. Consider, if you will, a simple example of intentions which are bad/good. This example is Adolf. This is your vibratory sound complex. The intention is to presumably unify by choosing the distortion complex called elite from a social memory complex and then enslaving, by various effects, those who are seen as the distortion of not-elite. There is then the concept of taking the social memory complex thus weeded and adding it to a distortion thought of by the so-called Orion group as an empire. The problem facing them is that they face a great deal of random energy released by the concept of separation. This causes them to be vulnerable as the distortions amongst their own members are not harmonized.”

Carla Rueckert

Session 7 http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=7#14
Quotations as Ra

Problem , Memory

“The imperturbability of the Church resides in her ability to harmonize the unconditional preservation of eternal truths with an unmatchable elasticity of adjustment to the circumstances and challenges of changing times.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), Problems of Women's Education (1932)

Truth , Change , Time

“But it will always be impossible to harmonize justice and war. It is always possible to purchase materials with money, but patriotism can not be purchased. Unless the people are willing to defend their country because of their belief in it, because of their affection for it, and because it is representative of their home, their country can not be defended. If we are looking for a more complete reign of justice, a more complete supremacy of law, a more complete social harmony, we must seek it in the paths of peace. Progress in these directions under the present order of the world is not likely to be made except during a state of domestic and international tranquility. One of the great questions before the nations to-day is how to promote such tranquility.”

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

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

Money , War , People , World

“A Greek architect of the great epoch would no more have thought of omitting the mark of the harmonic scale of proportion, on which the design was based, than would the composer of music think of omitting the harmonic scale of his composition.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Source: Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922), Ch. II

Music , Thinking

“I don't know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies. I do know that we don't have free trade. What goes for 'free trade' is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies—national and transnational international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please. My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump and Trade," http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/trump-and-trade/ WorldNetDaily.com, March 11, 2016.
2010s, 2016

People , Health , World , Law

“Now, as discord is allowable, and even necessarily opposed to concord, why may not noise, or a seeming jargon, be opposed to fixed sounds and harmonical proportion? Some of the discords in modern music, unknown till this century, are what the ear can but just bear, but have a very good effect as to contrast. The severe laws of preparing and resolving discord, may be too much adhered to for great effect; I am convinced that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it.”

Charles Burney (1726–1814) English music historian

The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) pp. 152-3

Law , Music , Strong

“Something deep down in me seems to furnish me with the belief that Providence has destined India to be the laboratory in which the greatest experiment of cultural synthesis will be undertaken and successfully completed. India’s mission in the world history seems to be evolution of a distinct type of humanity, combining and harmonizing in itself lives of the diverse types which history has produced, all blended together to form a new type that might evolve a characteristic and, perhaps, more satisfactory patterns of civilized existence than those in vogue at present.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

Source: Uniqueness of Zakir Husain and His Contributions (1997), p. 36.

World , History

“Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Quotation.
Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834)

“Hence the ancient architects, following in the footsteps of nature, perfected the ascending rows of seats in theatres from their investigations of the ascending voice, and by means of the canonical theory of the mathematicians and that of the musicians, endeavoured to make every voice uttered on the stage come with greater clearness and sweetness to the ears of the audience. For just as musical instruments are brought to perfection of clearness in the sound of their strings by means of bronze plates or horn, so the ancients devised methods of increasing the power of the voice in theatres through the application of harmonics.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book V, Chapter IV, Sec. 8

Music , Nature , Perfection

“One of the oldest mythological fables tells of Mercury playing at dice with Selene and winning from her the five days of the epact (thus totaling the 365 days of the year and harmonizing the lunar and solar calendars).”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Five, Coups And Games With Dice, p. 125

“.. in my ideal of a good painting; there's unity. The drawing and the colour are no longer distinct; as soon as you paint you draw; the more the colours harmonize, the more precise the drawing becomes. I know that from experience. When the colour is at its richest, the form is at its fullest.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 221 in: 'What he told me – III. The Studio'

Drawing , Painting

“My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls, I perceived decay had made progress, even in seven months - many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms.

I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor - the middle one, gray, and half buried in heath - Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot - Heathcliff's still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Mr. Lockwood (Ch. XXXIV). (Closing lines).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Home , Imagination , Autumn , Grass

“With a note of music, one strikes the fundamental, and, in addition to the root note, other notes are generated: these are called the harmonic series…As one fundamental note contains within it other notes in the octave, two fundamentals produce a remarkable array of harmonics, and the number of possible combinations between all the notes increases phenomenally. With a triad, affairs stand a good chance of getting severely out of hand…”

Robert Fripp (1946) English guitarist, composer and record producer

[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, 114, 0-679-74275-1]
Elsewhere

Music , Chance

“The first was the classical line, which could be traced back to my early childhood and the Beethoven sonatas I heard my mother play. This line takes sometimes a neo-classical form (sonatas, concertos), sometimes imitates the 18th century classics (gavottes, the Classical symphony, partly the Sinfonietta). The second line, the modern trend, begins with that meeting with Taneyev when he reproached me for the “crudeness” of my harmonies. At first this took the form of a search for my own harmonic language, developing later into a search for a language in which to express powerful emotions (The Phantom, Despair, Diabolical Suggestion, Sarcasms, Scythian Suite, a few of the songs, op. 23, The Gambler, Seven, They Were Seven, the Quintet and the Second Symphony). Although this line covers harmonic language mainly, it also includes new departures in melody, orchestration and drama. The third line is toccata or the “motor” line traceable perhaps to Schumann’s Toccata which made such a powerful impression on me when I first heard it (Etudes, op. 2, Toccata, op. 11, Scherzo, op. 12, the Scherzo of the Second Concerto, the Toccata in the Fifth Concerto, and also the repetitive intensity of the melodic figures in the Scythian Suite, Pas d’acier[The Age of Steel], or passages in the Third Concerto). This line is perhaps the least important. The fourth line is lyrical; it appears first as a thoughtful and meditative mood, not always associated with the melody, or, at any rate, with the long melody (The Fairy-tale, op. 3, Dreams, Autumnal Sketch[Osenneye], Songs, op. 9, The Legend, op. 12), sometimes partly contained in the long melody (choruses on Balmont texts, beginning of the First Violin Concerto, songs to Akhmatova’s poems, Old Granny’s Tales[Tales of an Old Grandmother]). This line was not noticed until much later. For a long time I was given no credit for any lyrical gift whatsoever, and for want of encouragement it developed slowly. But as time went on I gave more and more attention to this aspect of my work. I should like to limit myself to these four “lines,” and to regard the fifth, “grotesque” line which some wish to ascribe to me, as simply a deviation from the other lines. In any case I strenuously object to the very word “grotesque” which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea. As a matter of fact the use of the French word “grotesque” in this sense is a distortion of the meaning. I would prefer my music to be described as “Scherzo-ish” in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo—whimsicality, laughter, mockery.”

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) Ukrainian & Russian Soviet pianist and composer

Page 36-37; from his fragmentary Autobiography.
Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences (1960)

Age , Dreams , Music , Search

“A happy coincidence brought together [in Die Brücke ]the really talented men whose characters and gifts, even in human terms, left them with no other choice than the profession of artist. This form of living, of dwelling and working, though peculiar for a regular human being, was not a deliberate 'epater le bourgeois', but simply a very naive and pure necessity to harmonize art and life. And it was precisely this more than anything else that so tremendously influenced the forms of present-day art. Of course, it was mostly misunderstood and totally distorted, for there [the will] fashioned the form and gave it meaning, whereas here the unfamiliar form is affixed to habit, like a top hat on a cow.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

from Kirchner's Diary, 1923; as quoted in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 93
1920's

Life , Men , Art , Fashion

“Kindness, altruistic love, and compassion are qualities that do not harmonize well with bias. Restricting the field of our compassion not only diminishes it quantitatively but also qualitatively. Applying our compassion only to certain beings, human beings in this case, makes it a lesser and a poorer thing.”

Matthieu Ricard (1946) French writer and Buddhist monk

Source: A Plea for the Animals (2014), Chapter 1, p. 39

Love

“The ancient Greeks knew the laws that govern the propagation of light in a uniform medium and upon its reflection. However, the law governing the refraction of light as it passes from one transparent medium to another was unknown until the last century. Snell discovered it, Descartes tried to explain it and Fermat criticized his explanation. Since then, many great geometers have researched the problem, although no one has yet found a way of harmonizing the law of refraction with more fundamental laws that Nature must obey.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

Law , Way , Nature , Problem

“The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them…I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.”

Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician

About the new modal style. Interviewed by The Jazz Review, 1958; Quotes in Paul Maher, ‎Michael K. Dorr (2009) Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis, p. 18.
1950s

Music , Guy , Thinking