Today I’m starting a new series, For the Sheer Beauty of It! I plan to show you links to some of my favorite recordings and videos that are just plain beautiful. Johann Strauss’s Emperor Waltz with elegant dancing in ……
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I am music….
For the final entry in this series of music quotes, I found this moving treatise on music, related in the first person as if music herself is speaking to us. If you have time to listen to some of the…
The particular and the universal
I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions…
Wilde on Music
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one…
Merry Christmas to All!
I wish all of my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. For insights into what the actual birth of Jesus probably was like, see this article. He probably wasn’t born in a barn, relegated to a cave,…
Victor Hugo on Music
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. Victor Hugo (1802-1886) Quoted in Music Lovers Quotations, edited by Helen Exley. Hugo was a French novelist, poet, and dramatist. His most famous…
Dvorak on the American voice
In the Negro Melodies of America I discover a great and Noble School of Music…. These beautiful and varied themes are the products of the soil. They are the folk songs of the United States. Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) Quoted in…
Music Makes Joy More Joyful
How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations? Joy is more joyful, given a tune. Jane Swan (1925-2010) Quoted in Music Lovers Quotations, edited by Helen Exley. Jane Swan taught history at…
Shakespeare on music
The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus: let…
Music, Art of the Prophets
“Music is the art of the prophets” Martin Luther (1483-1546) Music is the art of the prophets, the only art that calms the agitations of the soul. Martin Luther is most remembered as a founder of the Protestant Reformation. His…