Quotes about rhythm
page 3

“She wondered what had caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited together in a single, well-orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Music, Time

“To synthesize is not necessarily to simplify in the sense of suppressing certain parts of the object: it is to simplify in the sense of rendering intelligible. It is, in short, to put in hierarchic order: to set each picture to a single rhythm, to a dominant; it is sacrifice, to subordinate — to generalize.”

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) French painter

Quote, 1907 from Denis' text 'Synthetism'; as cited in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Herschel Browning Chipp, ‎Peter Selz - 1968, p. 105
1890 - 1920

Intelligence, Sense, Parting

“Alpine skiers look like their feet are stuck in cement. Telly skiing is about mobility, rhythm, and balance.”

Kasha Rigby (1970) American skier

Interview with Outside Magazine (February 1996) http://outside.away.com/outside/magazine/0296/9602disk.html

“The important task of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms, or free lines.... the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance. In painting, the primary color that is as pure as possible realizes this abstraction of natural color.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in: 'Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art', Piet Mondrian (1937); in 'Documents of modern Art' ed. Robert Motherwell for Wittenborn, Schulz, New York 1945
1930's

Law, Art, Color, Nature

“A certain ambiguity of rhythm is one of the beauties of a poem”

Anne Ridler (1912–2001) English poet, editor

The Anatomy of Poetry, Marjoie Boulton, Routledge & Kegan, London 1953.

Beauty

“To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader.”

Amy Lowell (1874–1925) US writer

Dial (January 1917).

Intelligence, Understanding, Reading

“Treatises may be didactic in tone, but essentially they lack the conclusiveness of an instruction which could be asserted, like doctrine, by virtue of its own authority. … Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation. For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of the German Mourning Play] (1925), p. 28

Way, Thinking

“The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward everlasting fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia carent vate sacro [because they lack a sacred bard]. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

This passage has sometimes been paraphrased as "History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man". A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

Life, Death, Men, Peace

“It is therefore necessary to prepare the imminent and inevitable identification of man with the motor, facilitating and perfecting an incessant exchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct and metallic discipline, quite utterly unknown to the majority of humanity and only divined by the most lucid mind.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

1910's, Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine' 1911
Source: Günter Berghaus (2000) International Futurism in Arts and Literature. p. 318

Perfection

“Schumann’s Kreisleriana: No other cycle among Schumann’s great works so perfectly expresses the sensation of dark nocturnal things, of chaos, lurking in the background. The last piece of this collection shows this particularly well. Like skeletons on horseback, shadowy figures flit before us in a soft, sustained rhythm; in the middle section horn-calls enliven the scene with visions of knightly strength and nobility, but at the end the figures vanish ghost - like into night and mystery. Looking into the first volume of Schumann’s diaries we find ‘Midnight Piece,’ a prose passage which provides moving, indeed alarming evidence of his perilously depressive mental state. It contains elements of a highly personal kind which memorably convey the particular quality of his imagination, mortally cold and never far from visions of death. It could have served perfectly as a model for the final, disturbing piece in the Kreisleriana set.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Death, Imagination, Personality, Night

“Among flower vases, the ware that is given the highest rank is old Iga, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it commands the highest price. When old Iga has been dampened, its colors and its glow take on a beauty such as to awaken on afresh. Iga was fired at very high temperatures. The straw ash and the smoke from the fuel fell and flowed against the surface, and as the temperature dropped, became a sort of glaze. Because the colors were not fabricated but were rather the result of nature at work in the kiln, color patterns emerged in such varieties as to be called quirks and freaks of the kiln. The rough, austere, strong surfaces of old Iga take on a voluptuous glow when dampened. It breathes to the rhythm of the dew of the flowers.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Beauty, Color, Flowers, Nature

“There cannot be a greater error than to suppose that the poet does not feel what he writes. What an extraordinary, I might say, impossible view, is this to take of an art more connected with emotion than any of its sister sciences. What — the depths of the heart are to be sounded, its mysteries unveiled, and its beatings numbered by those whose own heart is made by this strange doctrine — a mere machine wound up by the clock-work of rhythm! No; poetry is even more a passion than a power, and nothing is so strongly impressed on composition as the character of the writer. I should almost define poetry to be the necessity of feeling strongly in the first instance, and the as strong necessity of confiding in the second.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Art, Error, Feeling, Confidence

“Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

Life, Men, Dreams, Thinking

“What is this creature, Music, save the Art,
The Rhythm that the planets journey by?
The living Sun-Ray entering the heart,
Touching the Life with that which cannot die?”

John Masefield (1878–1967) English poet and writer

" Where does the uttered Music go? http://www.williamwalton.net/works/choral/where_does_the_uttered_music_go.html" (1946)

Life, Art, Music, Sun

“When I think of myself in those years, it seems to me that I was playing quite freely and fluently, tonally pure. But there is still have many years of hard work over the sound, rhythm and dynamics. Of course, most importantly, a deep comprehension of the inner content.”

David Oistrakh (1908–1974) Soviet violinist

oistrakh.ru Biography of David Oistrakh http://www.oistrakh.ru/en/david_oistrakh/biography/.

Thinking

“What interested me about Chuck Berry was the way he could step out of the rhythm part with such ease, throwing in a nice, simple riff, and then drop straight into the feel of it again. We used to play a lot more rhythm stuff. We'd do away with the differences between lead and rhythm guitar. You can't go into a shop and ask for a "lead guitar."”

Keith Richards (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

You're a guitar player, and you play a guitar.
[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, Alfred A. Knopf, 0-679-74275-1].

Way, Feeling, Parting

“I dispersed my objects in space and got them to hold together by making them radiate forwards, out of the picture. It's all an easy interplay of chords and rhythms made up of foreground and background colours, of conducting lines, of distances and of contrasts.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from Exhibition catalogue Fernand Léger, Paris 1972, p. 91
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1970's

“"Rock" [music]… is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2000, The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000)

People, Music, Light, Universe

“The rectangular plane of varying dimensions and colours visibly demonstrates that internationalism does not mean chaos ruled by monotony but an ordered and clearly divided unity. In Neo-Plasticism, there are, in fact, very definite boundaries. But these boundaries are not really closed; the straight lines in rectangular opposition to one another constantly intersect, so that their rhythm continues throughout the whole work... These frontiers will be clearly defined but not 'closed'; there will be no customs, no work permits. 'Foreigners' will not be viewed as aliens.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in 'The New Art – The New Life', Piet Mondrian, op. cit. Introd. Note 1., 1931
1930's

“I think it really is all about technique, but it's where the intersection of acting and singing sort of meets. There has to be a musicality to the delivery of a line of dialogue that gives it impact. Somebody like Nathan Lane understands that. It's in his bones really. He can deliver a line five different ways, and each one has incredible impact and intonation and rhythm.”

Nathan Lane (1956) American actor

Rob Minkoff, on Lane's ability with voice acting — reported in Evan Henerson (July 19, 2002) No Vocal Yokels - When Animated Characters Need That Extra Dimension, Stars Step Up To The Mic", Daily News of Los Angeles, p. U6.
About

Music, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“One of my friends whom I hold in high esteem admitted to me the other day that when he wants to work nowadays … he has to turn on his radio. The droning of the loudspeaker—so he says—puts him in a favorable frame of mind and ideas pour out. I cannot help but thinking that this is not the act of a true musician. For thought has a rhythm of its own, which must either clash with the rhythm from outside and lose energy, or else submit to the outer impulse in restless slavery.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 34

Idea, Thinking, Help

“People dancing all in the street
See the rhythm all in their feet
Life is good, wild and sweet.
Let the music play on (play on, play on)
Feel it in your heart
And feel it in your soul
Let the music take control.”

Lionel Richie (1949) American singer-songwriter, musician, record producer and actor

All Night Long (All Night).
Song lyrics, Can't Slow Down (1983)

Life, People, Music, Feeling

“The term "chorus form" is often used to denote a type of performance - typically in jazz or rhythm 'n' blues, but also sometimes in country music and rock 'n' roll - where a given structural unit is repeated an indefinite number of times. The unit itself may be sectionally elaborate, as in the case of most Tin Pan Alley ballads. It may be twelve-bar blues, or something similar, as in the case of many R&B and rock 'n' roll numbers: here, a three-line AAB lyric, set to a three-phrase melody, is underpinned by a single gestural sweep in the harmony. Occasionally - as in some funk, dub reggae, and hip-hop, for example - it may approach the status of open-ended process.”

Richard Middleton British musicologist

[Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ISBN 0631212639, Middleton, Richard, 1999]

Music, Time, Country

“A chance remark by Ardini, an Italian master carver whom I met there [in Rome], that 'marble changes colour under different people's hands' made me decide immediately that it was not dominance which one had to attain over material, but an understanding, almost a kind of persuasion, and above all greater co-ordination between head and hand. This thought has recurred again and again ever since - and has developed my greatest interests; the reason why people both move differently and stand differently in direct response to changed surroundings; the unconscious grouping of people when they are working together, producing a spatial movement which approximates to the structure of spirals in shells or rhythms in crystal structure; the meaning of the spaces between forms, or the shape of the displacement of forms in space, which in themselves have a most precise significance. All these responses spring from a factual and tactile approach to the object.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Extract from Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, (from Chapter 1: The excitement of discovering the nature of carving, 1903-1930), with an introduction by Herbert Read, London, 1952
1947 - 1960

People, Spring, Understanding, Change

“Modern European composers…have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.”

George Gershwin (1898–1937) American composer and pianist

Page 386
The Composer in the Machine Age (1933)

Age, Music, Help

“The regular rhythms of factory production and its clear divisions of work time and nonwork time tend to decline in the realm of immaterial labor. Think how at the high end of labor market companies like Microsoft try to make the office more like home, offering free meals and exercise programs to keep employees in the office as many of their waking hours as possible. At the low end of the labor market workers have to juggle several job to make ends meet. Such practices always existed, but today, with the passage from Fordism to post-Fordism, the increased flexibility and mobility imposed on workers, and the decline of the stable, long-term employment typical of factory work, this tends to become the norm. At both the high end and low ends or labor market the new paradigm undermines the division between work time and the time of life.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

145
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Life, Exercises, Home, Thinking

“I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

"Moss-Gathering," ll. 9-13
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Life, Nature

“Akhmatova's seeming successor as the best living Russian poet is Voznesensky. His talent is dazzling. He has the gift of fresh, witty perception, works with unusual images and modern rhythms. His poetry is marvelously dynamic.”

Andrey Voznesensky (1933–2010) Soviet poet

Olga Carlisle in The New York Times, September 11, 1966.
Criticism

“At one point the driver said, "For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there." Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Three, Ch. 5
On the Road (1957)

God, Angels, Cars, Soul

“I have just had my first lesson in Chinese brush from my friend and artist Teng Kwei. The tree is no more solid in the earth, breaking into lesser solids in the earth, breaking into lesser solids bathed in chiaroscuro. There is pressure and release. Each movement, like tracks in the snow, is recorded and often loved for itself. The Great Dragon is breathing sky, thunder and shadow; wisdom and spirit vitalized. All is in motion now... One step backward into the past and the tree in front of my studio in Seattle is all rhythm, lifting, springing upward.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Source: 1950's, In: Reminiscence and Reverie, 1951, p. 66

Love, Wisdom, Spring, Tree

“As one of the handful of girls who worked with both of those dance geniuses, I think I can give an honest comparison. In my opinion, Kelly is the more inventive choreographer of the two. Astaire, with Hermes Pan's help, creates fabulous numbers - for himself and his partner. But Kelly can create an entire number for somebody else… I think, however, that Astaire's coordination is better than Kelly's… his sense of rhythm is uncanny. Kelly, on the other hand, is the stronger of the two. When he lifts you, he lifts you!… To sum it up, I'd say they were the two greatest dancing personalities who were ever on screen. But it's like comparing apples and oranges. They're both delicious.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Cyd Charisse in Charisse, Cyd; Martin, Tony; Kleiner, Dick. The Two of Us, New York: Mason/Charter, 1976. ISBN 0-884-053636.

Girl, Thinking, Sense, Help

“The "medium is the message" is one of the world's silliest remarks. The message is the message, and it doesn't matter whether you send it by e-mail, a note in a bottle or on a picture postcard. The book, or the poem, or the play is what counts and it doesn't matter if it's written with a pen on a long sheet of ruled paper, as I am writing now, or on the most highly developed word processor. No machine can help with the rhythms of your prose, even if it can spell better than you can.”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 28 : Inventions and the Decline of Language

Books, World, Help

“Every sound perceived by the acute ear in the rhythm of the world about us can be represented musically. Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

Statement of 1910, as quoted in Debussy on Music (1977) edited and translated by Françoise Lesure and Richard Langham Smith, p. 243

People, World, Music

“It is a delicate & difficult art fitting rhythm to an idea…communicating momentary phases in a poet's mind.”

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

Speculations (Essays, 1924)

Art, Communication, Idea

“As far as the sensory experience of the spectator goes, the most outstanding American kinetic artist is unquestionably the Chinese-born Wen-Ying Tsai. His pieces, which are perfect on the technological level, serve the primary purpose of giving a complete visual experience to the spectator, whose sound solicitations provoke a choreographic, chromatic and rhythmic response in the ‘cybernetic sculptures’. […]
György Kepes has commented enthusiastically on the ‘magic rhythms emanating from this swaying, dancing steel trembling with life’, and he has also noted the sense of ‘an instant fellowship, a spontaneous celebration’ which is re-created in their presence. As he concludes: ‘Rhythm is friendship and in Tsai’s work there is friendship of light, sound and our own heart-beats.’
If this appraisal testifies to the success with which Tsai affects the sensory and emotional responses of the spectator, we must not neglect the fact that he is also addressing himself to reason and the scientific element in his audience. In effect, the observer can enter an almost mathematical relationship with these works, and sharpen his perceptual powers through the exact assessment of the various aesthetic parameters of vibration, sound, colour, wave movement, etc.”

Frank Popper (1918) French art historian

Frank Popper, Art--Action and Participation, New York University Press, 1975, p. 214

Life, Friendship, Mathematics, Sense

“Well I was eating lunch at the D. L. G.
When this little girl came and she sat next to me
I never seen nobody move the way she did
Well she did and she does and she'll do it again.
When you move like a jellyfish
Rhythm don't mean nothing
You go with the flow
You don't stop
Move like a jellyfish
Rhythm is nothing
You go with the flow
You don't stop”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Bubble Toes.
Song lyrics, Brushfire Fairytales (2001)

Way, Girl

“Human beings have always been struck by the complex harmony and intricate organization of the physical world. The march of the heavenly bodies across the sky, the rhythms of the seasons, the pattern of a snowflake, the myriads of living creatures so well adapted to their environment – all these things seem too well arranged to be a mindless accident.”

Paul Davies (1946) British physicist

Source: The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (1992), Ch. 8: 'Designer Universe', p. 194

World, Season

“Joy can come alive like that, when random pieces of history and rhythm, pause and expectation, melody and lyric, suddenly rearrange themselves into a pattern that leaps up, back against the wall, and catches your heart.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

"Forty Years" Slow Trains Vol.7, Issue 3 (2008)
2000-09

History, Heart, Joy

“Man is an organism, not a mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Individuality and Modernity,” Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: 1958), p. 66.

Life, Nature

“Well, if I were thus rationed in this article and could have but one adjective for George Gershwin, that adjective would be "ingenuous." Ingenuous at and about his piano. Once an occasional composer named Oscar Levant stood beside that piano while those sure, sinewy, catlike Gershwin fingers beat their brilliant drum-fire—the tumultuous cascade of the "Rhapsody In Blue," the amorous languor of "The Man I Love," the impish glee of "Fascinating Rhythm," the fine, jaunty, dust-spurning scorn of "Strike Up the Band." If the performer was familiar with the work of any other composer, he gave no evidence of it. Levant (who, by the way, makes a fleeting appearance in the new Dashlell Hammett book, under the guise of Levi Oscant) could be heard mutterIng under his breath, "An evening with Gershwin Is a Gershwln evening."
"I wonder," said our young composer dreamily, "if my music will be played a hundred years from now."
"It certainly will be," said the bitter Levant,"if you are still around."”

Alexander Woollcott (1887–1943) American critic

"George the Ingenuous" in Cosmopolitan (November 1933); reprinted in Ch. IV: "'...A Young Colossus...'" https://books.google.com/books?id=ATcjgQTx0uIC&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false from Gershwin Remembered (1992) by Edward Jablonski, pp. 44-45

Love, Books, Music, Way

“Actions which are conscious expressions of the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out rhythm are religious.
The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search — for therein is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.
Anything else is a competitive quarrel over (or Hollywood-love sharing of) studio props.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

Drop Out, Turn On. Tune In.
Start your own Religion (1967)

Love, Life, Search, Personality

“Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 181

Life, Women, Beauty

“My concern is with the rhythms of nature... I work inside out, like nature.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Quoted in Leonhard Emmerling (2003) Jackson Pollock: 1912-1956 Taschen, p. 48
in posthumous publications

Nature

“To begin with, the basis of English poetry is rhythm, or, as some would prefer to call it, cadence. This rhythm is obtained by mingling stressed and unstressed syllables.”

John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) American writer

Preface to Irradiations; Sand and Spray, 1915

“Now, I should like to say something else to you about the connection with music, primarily that of Bach, i. e. the Fugue or, put more simply, the canon... It has a great deal in common with my own motifs, which I make turn on various axes too. Nowadays I have such a powerful sense of relationship, of affinity, that when I am listening to Bach I frequently get inspired and feel an overwhelming instinct for his insistent rhythm, a cadence seeking something of the infinite. In the Fugue everything is based on a single motif, often consisting of just a few notes. In my work, too, everything revolves around a single closed contour..”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van M.C. Escher, in het Nederlands): 'Nu wou ik je nog wat zeggen over het verband met muziek, en wel in hoofdzaak met die van Bach, d.w.z. de Fuga, of eenvoudiger canon.. .Het heeft heel veel van mijn motieven, die ik ook om verschillende assen laat draaien. Ik heb dat gevoel van relatie, verwantschap, tegenwoordig zoo sterk, dat ik tijdens het luisteren naar Bach, dikwijls geïnspireerd word en een sterke drang naar zijn dwingende ritme voel, een cadans die iets van de eindeloosheid zoekt. In de Fuga is alles gebaseerd op een enkel motief, dikwijls maar van enkele noten. Bij mij draait ook alles om een enkele gesloten contour.. Quote from Escher’s letter, 1940 to his friend Hein 's-Gravezande; as cited (and translated!) on the website of museum 'Escher in the Palace', The Hague: dutch original text https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-vandaag and english translation https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-today/?lang=en 1940's

Music, Feeling, Sense

“[Is "90 Millas" another crossover -- into World Music? ] I can see that. The core is African rhythm -- half of the world's music comes from that. The difference between our music and American blues: Cubans may have been slaves, but in Cuba slaves became part of the family. They could buy their freedom. And they are Island people. And Island people are happier. But, you know, in the '80s, when we released "Conga," wasn't that World Music? Everywhere we went, people got it. And why? The drums. So maybe all music is World Music, and the only question is: Do you like it?”

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

www.huffingtonpost.com (September 7, 2007)
2007, 2008

People, World, Family, Music

“The subtlety of Brazilian rhythms comes from the type of instruments used. Afro-Cuban music has a scraper called the güiro which is played with a solid stick producing a loud scraping noise. This same instrument is paralleled in Braziliam music with the reco-reco, the difference being that the reco-reco is much smaller, less resonant, and played with something like a brush. The cabasa is a gourd wrapped in beads that is incapable of extremely loud noise. The same is true of the chocalho or cylinder, and the tambourine. A regular set of drums contrasts this. The result is a light rhythm that, unlike the conga, bongos and timbales of Afro-Cuban music, does not engulf the listener but permeates him. To this is usually added the guitar (unamplified) played finger-style, which completes the subtlety.”

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

From "Clare Fischer on Bossa Nova" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#3f6344g3cshffpj in Downbeat (November 8, 1962), p. 23

Music, Light

“The Void is a living void
… pulsating in endless rhythms of creation
and destruction. The great Void does not
exist as Void, it embraces all
Being/non-Being”

Frederick Franck (1909–2006) Dutch painter

Source: Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985), p. 63

“[the canvas.. ] rubbing in with a handful of straw, with a rag, a scrubbing brush, a Majorcan brush for applying white, with the hand, etc.... [a drawing in a] gigantic rhythm like that of a waterfall cascading down a mountainside.... [works based on] pure signs begun in Varensgeville and finished in Palma.... [with a picture ground of] blue vitriol [a pesticide] that they use for the vines and that splashes against the walls of the farmhouse..”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Miro describes his 'attacks' on the canvas
Quote of Miró in his 'Working notes, 1941 – 1942'; as cited in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 69
1940 - 1960

Drawing

“One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from 'Mon amie et la plage' [My girlfriend and the beach], Salvador Dali, 1927; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 47-48
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Painting, Sea

“I've always believed that any instrumentalist is basically just an accompanist to the singer and the words. That's born out of being a fan of records before I was a fan of guitar players -- I'm interested in melody, lyrics, and the overall song. I don't like to waste notes, not even one. Who was it that said, "The reason why all those guitar players play so many notes is because they can't find the right one"? I like to put the right note in the right place, and my influences have always been those kinds of players. Keith Richards comes to mind, and I really like Nils Lofgren's soloing, because he's so melodic. I love John Lennon's rhythm playing, and George Harrison was an incredible guitarist.
There's a lot of guitar culture that I don't like at all. I find the traditional idea of the guitar hero to be really irrelevant to the 1990s. I don't think that young people are that impressed with some guy brandishing Spandex trousers and a hideously shaped guitar, playing that kind of masturbatory, egotistical noise. Being a soloist who wants to just display virtuosity is a dated philosophy, and I don't think there's any room for it in pop music. It's the last stand of late-'60s/early-'70s rockism, and it should have gone a long time ago.”

Johnny Marr (1963) musician

from an interview by Joe Gore, Guitar Player(January 1990).

Love, People, Music, Guy

“Metre is to rhythm as eye is to ear.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

'Vision and Resonance:Two senses of Poetic Form' OUP London 1975

“Why do we call ourselves 'Imagists'. Well why not? Well I think it is a very good and descriptive title and it serves to enunciate some of the principles we mos firmly believe in… Direct treatment of the subject… as few adjectives as possible… a hardness, as of cut stone… individuality of rhythm…”

Richard Aldington (1892–1962) English writer and poet

Modern Poetry and the Imagists in the Egoist, London 1914

Thinking

“This annoyed me: I was on the phone with somebody today tryin to get a phone number from that person and write it down, but they didn't have phone number rhythm and that pissed me off. You know what I'm talkin about? Phone number rhythm. Especially if there's like an area code involved, like 'two one two - bum bum buh - bum buh bum buh!' That is the rhythm I think we're all familiar with. This guy had no clue! I was like "Okay, Hank. Gimme the number." He's like "Alright. It's two one two nine - fifteen eight eleven six [mumbling incoherently] fou.. tw.. five.. eight.. seven.. two." "Did you throw in your zip code? Cause I got a lot of extra numbers over here. I have extra. I can almost start a new number! What do ya got?! Start again from the top!" They really screw you up on the last four numbers. That's where they get ya. "Five five five - six.. teen forty one" "Dude, I already wrote the six! I made the dash too close, I can't shimmy the one in there now! Forget you!"”

Kevin James (1965) American actor and comedian

Sweat The Small Stuff (2001)

Guy, Thinking, Personality, Forgetting

“These elements — rhythm, rhyme, harmony and concinnity — can inevitably be identified within whatever is proclaimed 'poetry.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“Why can't a writer use writing as a painter uses paint? I try to. When I wrote The Tree of Man I felt I couldn't write about simple, illiterate people in a perfectly literate way; but in my present novel the language is more sophisticated. I think perhaps I have clarified my style quite a lot over the years. I find it a great help to hear the language going on around me; not that what I write, the narrative, is idiomatic Australian, but the whole work has a balance and rhythm which is influenced by what is going on around you. When you first write the narrative it might be unconscious, but when you come to work it over you do it more consciously. It gives what I am writing a greater feeling of reality.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

People, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“Interpretation is as improvisation as improvising from silence is. It is just a different way of looking at it. When you improvise form interpretation you have certain dramatic ideas, you have a certain structure. But you know that everything that is in that is relative and flexible. Even pitch can be a matter of interpretation. Rhythm is relative.”

Hilary Hahn (1979) American violinist

Why Violinist Hilary Hahn Will Never Just Stick to the Classical Repertoire (2012)

Way, Idea, Silence

“I've rediscovered the part of my brain that can't decode anything, that can't add, that can't work from a verbalized concept, that doesn't care about stylish notation, that makes melodies that have pitch and rhythm, that doesn't know anything about zen eternity and gets bored and changes, that isn't worried about being commercial or avant-garde or serial or any other little category. Beauty is enough.”

Beth Anderson (1950) American neo-romantic composer

Variant quotes:
I've rediscovered the part of my brain that can't decode anything, that can't add, that can't work from a verbalized concept, that doesn't know anything about Zen eternity and gets bored and changes, that isn't worried about being commercial or avant-garde or serial or any other little category. Beauty is enough.
Beauty is Revolution (1980)
Source: Jane Weiner LePage (1983) Women composers, conductors, and musicians of the twentieth century: selected biographies. p. 14

Beauty, Change, Parting

“Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Jamesh A. Leit, George Whalley Symboles Dans la Vie Et Dans L'art http://books.google.co.in/books?id=pRZEKhofl_gC&pg=PA29, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1987, p. 29

Music

“God, but you're beautiful, aren't you?
Feel your warm hand walking around.
I won't pull away.
My passion always wins.
So keep on a-moving in.
So keep on a-tuning in.
Synchronise rhythm now.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

God, Beauty, Feeling, Passion

“My ego only needs a good rhythm section.”

Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician

In [Milestones: The music and times of Miles Davis since 1960, Jack, Chambers, Beech Tree Books, 1983, 9780688046460, 261]
"My ego only needs a good rhythm section" is also the title of an interview/article by Stephen Davis for The Real Paper (21 March 1973)
On being asked what he looked for in musicians.
1970s

“I got rhythm,
I got music,
I got my man
Who could ask for anything more?”

Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) American lyricist

"I Got Rhythm", Girl Crazy, Act I (1930).

Music

“I came from a family where my people didn't like rhythm and blues. Bing Crosby - "Pennies from Heaven" - Ella Fitzgerald, was all I heard.”

Little Richard (1932) American pianist, singer and songwriter

quoted in Hamm (1979). Yesterdays, p. 391.
Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. .

People, Family

“But when the artist abandons visible appearance, as in Mondrian's black grids on white grounds filled with balancing rectangles of colour, many people feel left behind. And yet the rhythms of Mondrian are those of nature. The harmonies are those which guided proportion in classical buildings and Renaissance churches. Rothko's glowing maroon Seagram Murals at the Tate may, like Turner's late canvases, appear to be "of nothing" but in their brooding depth Rothko suggests another world. As one four year old child said of the Rothko room at the Tate "it makes me think of God."”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

God, People, World, Feeling

“The time of day we choose for prayer doesn't matter, so long as we keep it faithfully. Prayer must be part of the rhythm of our daily lives.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

Time, Parting

“I have no idea who that is. It's a terrible performance, the band is horribly out of tune—is that Maynard Ferguson? It starts off at a dynamic peak and never deviates from it. It also starts out with what is supposed to be jazz musicians trying to play some sort of a Latin bag, which is not making it, because there's no solidity of rhythms. Latin rhythm sections being based on the constant contrast of instruments, and it never moves any place. And then that thing on the end—what's that supposed to be? An adaptation of Porgy and Bess of some sort? I guess it was some sort of an allusion toward Porgy and Bess. But then if it is, it's completely escaped all the rest of it. It's like giving a paragraph of reference out of a two-page article and then saying, Well, this is about this.”

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

That's one star for me. Reviewing Slide Hampton's arrangement of "It Ain't Necessarily So" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a940h3-1NV0 from Two Sides of Slide; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe

Star, Idea

“There is a rhythm to the ending…”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

“The frantic desire to Live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

Life, Death

“Art at the moment is thrilling. The work of the artist today springs from innate impulses towards life, towards growth - impulses whose rhythms and structures have to do with the power and insistence of life. […] In the past, when sculpture was based on the human figure, we knew this structure well. But today we are concerned with structures in an infinitely wider sense, in a universal sense. Our thoughts can either lead us to life and continuity or […] the way to annihilation. That is why it is so important that we find our complete sense of continuity backwards and forwards in this new world of forms and values. I see the present development in art as something opposed to any materialistic, anti-human or mechanistic direction of mind.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Quote from a conversation with J.P. Hodin, 18 August 1959; in an extract from J.P. Hodin, Barbara Hepworth, London, 1961, Two Conversations with Barbara Hepworth: 'Art and Life' and 'The Ethos of Sculpture', pp. 23–24
1947 - 1960

Life, World, Art, Way

“Rhythm and blues used to be called race music. … This music was going on for years, but nobody paid any attention to it.”

Ray Charles (1930–2004) American musician

Pop Chronicles: Show 55 - Crammer: A lively cram course on the history of rock and some other things http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19838/m1/, interview recorded 3.8.1968 http://web.archive.org/web/20100116003442/http://www.library.unt.edu/music/special-collections/john-gilliland/index-to-interviews.

Music

“Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen
Or the golden-haired sons of kings,
Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves,
Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail”

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) poet, critic, translator

Poem The Ancient Speech

“Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed… The realisation of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art… We renounce the thousand-year-old delusion in art that held the static rhythms as the only elements of the plastic and pictorial arts. We affirm in these arts a new element, the kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

As quoted in: Fred Kleiner (2008) Intl Stdt Edition-Gardner's Art Thru/Ages: Globl Hist. Vol.2, p. 949
1918 - 1935, Realistic Manifesto, 1920

Life, World, Art, Time

“The brushstroke, in painting, is purely and
simply what it is – rhythm,
color, matter.”

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

ATV, 187; p. 175
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

Color, Painting

“Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/rollerball-2002 of the 2002 film Rollerball (8 February 2002) Reviews, Half-star reviews

Color, Search, Sense

“I try to avoid repetitions of any shot. It isn't easy to find one in my films. You might, I suppose, see something twice, but it would be rare. And then, you know, every line requires its own kind of shot. The American method of shooting one actor continuously, then moving to the other, then intercutting both — this method is wrong. A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Encountering Directors interview (1969)

“I'm becoming very interested in non-Western things, and in Europe a lot of what's offered to me is the Western tradition I've grown up with. Now I've got to find a way out, but the problem is that the piano is just about as Western as you can get. The piano's my instrument, and I wouldn't want it any other way, but I'm gravitating quite naturally towards things that have developed my sense of rhythm. "I've come to all this incredible Indian classical music and its more modern formations late in the day; the Messiaen I've played has led me down that road, and I've been following my nose all the time.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Times, 15/12/1998
Musician's life

Music, Way, Nature, Problem

“On my Fleischmann Hour from Rochester I went into a "rave" about the Victor record of ["It Must Be True"] as played by Gus Arnheim and his Cocoanut Grove Orchestra. From all reports that drift back to me, and from people that I know in California, Arnheim has the finest dance aggregation on the West Coast, and to my way of thinking, perhaps the finest in the entire world. It may sound like a rather broad statement, but I would be willing to back his organization against any other in any other part of the world. Although I have never seen them perform on the stage to what they have in the way of showmanship, from a pure musical standpoint I feel that they are unexcelled.
Perhaps my great admiration for them is increased by the presence of Bing Crosby, formerly the lead in Paul Whiteman's "Rhythm Boys", who, in my humble opinion, has the finest recording voice to which it has ever been my pleasure to listen. If he doesn't capture all the feminine hearts in America through his records, no one ever will. He has the most unique style of singing I have ever listened to since I used to enjoy the records of Charlie Kaley.”

Rudy Vallée (1901–1986) American singer, actor, bandleader, and entertainer

"Tuneful Topics", Radio Digest, June 1931. https://archive.org/stream/radiodigest2627unse#page/n869/mode/2up

People, Pleasure, World, Music

“Becoming a rock does not ensure safety. …The blasting of windblown sands, the pummeling of waves, the corrosive secretions of mosses and lichens, and even the steady rhythm of a stream can, in time, reduce a seemingly indestructible boulder to a grain of sand.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Secret, Time

“Hockey is an art. It requires speed, precision, and strength like other sports, but it also demands an extraordinary intelligence to develop a logical sequence of movements, a technique which is smooth, graceful and in rhythm with the rest of the game.”

Jacques Plante (1929–1986) Canadian ice hockey player

Quoted in Kevin Shea, "One on One with Jacques Plante," http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep197802.htm Legends of Hockey.net (2005-05-24)

Art, Game, Intelligence, Sport

“A contact sheet is so interesting, because you see how a photographer thinks. He comes closer and closer to a subject, corrects it, looks at it again, and then with tiny movements turns around until it is in exactly the right and exact relation to him. Contact sheets may be compared to the way you drive a nail into a plank. First you give several light taps to build up a rhythm and align the nail with the wood. Then, much more quickly, and with as few strokes as possible, you hit the nail forcefully on the head and drive it in.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Conversation. Interview with Byron Dobell (1957), p. 37

Way, Thinking, Light

“TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern…[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

“Rhythm includes metre, but metre is a relatively small part of rhythm.”

Marjorie Boulton (1924–2017) British writer

Anatomy of Poetry (1953)

Parting

“[Beauty is] "Perfection of rhythm, balanced perfection of rhythm. Everything in Nature is expressed by rhythmic waves of light. Every thought and action is a light-wave of thought and action. If one interprets the God within one, one’s thoughts and actions must be balanced rhythmic waves. Ugliness, fears, failures and diseases arise from unbalanced thoughts and actions. Therefore think beauty always if one desire vitality of body and happiness."”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

God, Happiness, Fear, Disease

“As I watched the seagulls, I thought: "That's the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust."”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek (1946), Ch. 21

“We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation"…In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003…the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once.That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible…Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer…In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally…Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country…And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html: On Michael Moore
2000s, 2004

Life, War, Children, Secret

“It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning

Sleep, Time

“Ultimately modelling, acting or dancing is a form of an art. There might be different ways to express these various arts but the basics are always same. We have only nine emotions all over the world and expressing those emotions in any form is going to be similar in one or the other way. there is a rhythm in everything. In modelling we hold the expressions or try to express with no emotions on face but with pride and attitude in acting we go with the flow of the emotions and in dance, we express through our face and body both in rhythm. So this rhythm and emotions are part of your expressions.”

Nikita Gokhale (1990) Indian Actress, Indian Model

"‘Interview with Nikita Gohkale’" https://vasfotios.wixsite.com/citylights/single-post/2017/12/12/Interview-with-Nikita-Gohkale. City Lights. December 12, 2017.

World, Art, Way, Dance

“One should view the present situation – the status quo – as being maintained by certain conditions or forces. A culture – for instance, the food habits of a certain group at a given time – is not a static affair but a live process like a river which moves but still keeps to a recognizable form…Food habits do not occur in empty space. They are part and parcel of the daily rhythm of being awake and asleep; of being alone and in a group; of earning a living and playing; of being a member of a town, a family, a social class, a religious group... in a district with good groceries and restaurants or in an area of poor and irregular food supply. Somehow all these factors affect food habits at any given time. They determine the food habits of a group every day anew just as the amount of water supply and the nature of the river bed determine the ﬂow of the river, its constancy or change.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Kurt Lewin (1943) "Psychological ecology". In: D. Cartwright (Ed.) Field Theory in Social Science. London: Social Science Paperbacks. As cited in: Bernard Burnes (2004) " Kurt Lewin and the Planned Approach to Change: A Re-appraisal https://blackboard.le.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/institution/College%20of%20Social%20Science/School%20of%20Management/DL%20Materials/MBA/2.%20Organizational%20Behaviour/Section%208/Burnes.pdf" in: Journal of Management Studies. Vol 41. Nr 6. p. 977-1002. 1940s

Family, Food, Nature, Water

“There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached by Ravel towards the end of La Valse and towards the beginning of Bolero).”

Constant Lambert (1905–1951) British composer and conductor

"Exoticism and Low Life", p. 174.
Music, Ho! (1934)

Time, Dance

“When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word “depression.” Depression, most people know, used to be termed “melancholia,” a word which appears in English as early as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. “Melancholia” would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated — the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer — had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering “depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.
As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. “Brainstorm,” for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed. Told that someone’s mood disorder has evolved into a storm — a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else — even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that “depression” evokes, something akin to “So what?” or “You’ll pull out of it” or “We all have bad days.””

William Styron book Darkness Visible

The phrase “nervous breakdown” seems to be on its way out, certainly deservedly so, owing to its insinuation of a vague spinelessness, but we still seem destined to be saddled with “depression” until a better, sturdier name is created.
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), IV

People, Disease, School, Way

“Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter IV, Consolation For Inadequacy, p. 122.

“I've found opposition to my teaching because I said it's not the strength which does it, it's a rhythm. You don't need huge muscles great strength. In fact, if you have that and misuse it, you're going to damage the material. It's absurd. It's a rhythmical flow of an idea, whichever sex you are.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists', (1975), p. 15

Sex, Idea

“There can be no question of selecting in any direction, but of a penetrating the whole cosmic law of rhythms, forces and material that are the real world, from the ugliest to the most beautiful, everything that has character and expression, from the crudest and most brutal to the gentlest and most delicate; everything that speaks to us in its capacity as life. From this it follows that one must know all in order to be able to express all. It is the abolition of the aesthetic principle. We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions; we have never had any. What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life; our interest in life, in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art. We do not even know the laws of aesthetics. That old idea of selection according to the beauty-principle Beautiful — Ugly, like to ethical Noble — Sinful, is dead for us, for whom the beautiful is also ugly and everything ugly is endowed with beauty. Behind the comedy and the tragedy we find only life's dramas uniting both; not in noble heroes and false villains, but people.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Variant translations:
What we possess and what gives us strength is our joy in life, our interest in life in all its amoral facets. This is also the foundation for today's art. We do not even know the aesthetic laws.
We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions; we have never had any. What we have, and what constitutes our strength, is our joy in life, in all of its moral and amoral manifestations.
1940 - 1948, Intimate Banalities' (1941)

Life, People, World, Law

“In short it is my concern to emphasize that Gorky is, of all the surrealist artists, the only one who maintains direct contact with nature – sit down to paint before her. Furthermore, it is out of the question that he would take the expression of this nature as an end in itself – rightly he demands of her that she provide sensations that can serve as springboards for both knowledge and pleasure in fathoming certain profound states of mind... Here for the first time nature is treated as a cryptogram. The artist has a code by reason of his own sensitive anterior impressions, and can decode nature to reveal the very rhythm of life, in the discovery of the very rhythm of life.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote of Breton, from Introduction to the exhibition of Gorky's first show', Julien Levy Gallery', March 1945; as quoted in Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof, ed. by Matthew Spender, Ridinghouse, London, 2009, p. 258
after 1930

Life, Pleasure, Question, Nature

“Which one of us has not dreamed, on ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose: musical, without rhythm or rhyme; adaptable enough and discordant enough to conform to the lyrical movements of the soul, the waves of revery, the jolts of consciousness?Above all else, it is residence in the teeming cities, it is the crossroads of numberless relations that gives birth to this obsessional ideal.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, rêvé le miracle d'une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?C'est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes, c'est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant. "Dédicace, À Arsène Houssaye" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Po%C3%A8mes_en_prose Le spleen de Paris (1862)

Dreams, Music, Soul, Birth

“If I had to take eveything into consideration, [the truly essential song] would have to be "Conga." First, because I don't think I can get away with not performing that song in some shape or form. Second, because it started the possiblility of "Mi Tierra" [Estefan's top-selling Spanish album] happening. Not only did it talk about a specific rhythm of my homeland [Cuba], it talked about being Latino, and the celebratory nature of dance. It was very musically forward in that it mixed a funk bassline and a 2/4 beat on the drums and the Latin percussion. It was something that really put us on the map. And even though it's a frivolous and fun song, it talks about who we are as immigrants in this land.”

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

Reuters (November 17, 2006)
2007, 2008

Music, Nature, Thinking, Dance

“I am trying to intensify my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air – trying to make it all into a picture, with new movements and with colours that reduce our old easel paintings to absurdity.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote in Marc's letter to the publisher Reinhard Piper, 1908, as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, ed. Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 207
1905 - 1910

Feeling, Nature, Animals, Painting

“I think he Pollock responded to rhythm more than anything else in art. Indeed, perhaps it is not to much to assert that his greatest works are marked by the intensity and violence of his rhythm, modified by an incorruptible respect for the work's flat surface, an art masculine and lyrical and, as in a Celtic dance, measured, despite its original primitive impulse. That he also meant to me, his rhythm…”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

'Jackson Pollock: An Artists' Symposium', in 'ARTnews', Vol. 66, no. 2 April 1967
1960s

Art, Thinking, Dance