Baroque Music Quotes

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet.

How could anybody think of Bach as 'cold' when these [cello] suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry," Casals said. "As I got on with the study I discovered a new world of space and beauty... the feelings I experienced were among the purest and most intense in my artistic life!

Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time--it is the clue, like Ariadne's, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music.

Dido, heartbroken, decides to do what any operatic heroine would do at such a moment: sing an aria, then kill herself.

It [Bach's cello suites] is like a great diamond," said [Mischa] Maisky in a thick Russian accent, "with so many different cuts that reflect light in so many different ways.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

One reason people find baroque music soothing is that its inherent rhythm of sixty-four to sixty-eight beats per minute is similar to that of a calm, relaxed heart.

Age and use do not make a style obsolete in the church as they do in secular entertainment; rather, they consecrate it.

Vienna wasn't just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one's soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life. I was poor, but I was not alone, because I had a friend. And Vienna was like another friend. When it rained in the tropics, I always heard the voice of Vienna. And at other times too. Sometimes deep in the virgin forests I smelled the musty smell of the entrance hall in Hietzing. Music and everything I loved was in the stones of Vienna, and in people's glances and their behavior, the way pure feelings are part of one's very heart. You know when the feelings stop hurting. Vienna in winter and spring. The allés in Schönbrunn. The blue light in the dormitory at the academy, the great white stairwell with the baroque statue. Morning ridings in the Prater. The mildew in the riding school. I remember all of it exactly, and I wanted to see it again...

(regarding the prelude from suite two)... The key is minor, the three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spiter-like, relentlessly gathering sound into thighter concentric circle that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered.

Playing the cello did feel nicely neolithic, or at least a civilized way to process the primitive.

Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.

I tune the radio to a classical station playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, music I used to run to, a good omen, as I am running to a new life. I once heard that Olympic coaches play baroque music in the locker room before big meets to quell their athletes’ anxiety. I take a deep breath and wish for such a calm to overtake me. Still,

The works that Johann Sebastian Bach has left us, are a priceless national heritage, of a kind that no other race possesses.

Questions of Travel There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. —For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, aren't waterfalls yet, in a quick age or so, as ages go here, they probably will be. But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled. Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, inexplicable and impenetrable, at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? But surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road, really exaggerated in their beauty, not to have seen them gesturing like noble pantomimists, robed in pink. —Not to have had to stop for gas and heard the sad, two-noted, wooden tune of disparate wooden clogs carelessly clacking over a grease-stained filling-station floor. (In another country the clogs would all be tested. Each pair there would have identical pitch.) —A pity not to have heard the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird who sings above the broken gasoline pump in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: three towers, five silver crosses. —Yes, a pity not to have pondered, blurredly and inconclusively, on what connection can exist for centuries between the crudest wooden footwear and, careful and finicky, the whittled fantasies of wooden cages. —Never to have studied history in the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages. —And never to have had to listen to rain so much like politicians' speeches: two hour of unrelenting oratory and then a sudden golden silence in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: "Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Or could Pascal have been entirely right about just sitting quietly in one's room? Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?

For he – and this is truly what Central European writers do – drags around a terrible burden of linguistic and musical melodies; he hauls a piano and a dead horse behind him, along with everything that has been played on that piano and everything that the horse once bore into battle and to defeat – marble statues and bronze bearded busts, pictures in baroque frames, words and melodies that nobody can understand outside that language.

For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator.

It was Haydn and Mozart who really cracked the sonata, but it was Beethoven who reinvented it, just as he reinvented the symphony. Bach was king of the Baroque; Mozart and Haydn were kings of the Classical; Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, and Berlioz were the great Romantics. Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner brought music into the twentieth century; Stravinsky and Schoenberg redefined harmony. But Beethoven was in a class of his own. He didn’t write music to praise God. He didn’t write it to earn a living. Beethoven wrote music because he had to.

Handel's yearning for independence from the traditional chains of patronage and his persistence in monitoring his productions resulted with unique developments concerning Baroque 'opera seria'; however, paradoxically his personal obsession to obtain complete artistic freedom generated disastrous side-effects that eventually impeded the progress of opera in London.

To periodize or not to periodize? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged academes by periodizing (and thus to blaspheme through generalization) or to address large-scale stylistic trends without prevarication; ’tis a fardel to bear, and bear it we shall. For such utile aids are not to be scorned, but embraced lest even greater misunderstanding be our lot. O Baroque! O Classical! O Romantic! Though the thorns of despised love be your reward, we will invoke you even as we curse you, for, like our knees, thou art poorly made, but we cannot walk without you.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.

Much of the music of the north European Baroque is familiar to organists, but it is often played and registered in a static and lackluster manner. This music is exuberant; the big pieces were meant to be exciting and even startling, and the small pieces offer endless opportunities for color. Perhaps part of our problem lies in the familiar brittle-sounding “neo-Baroque” instruments of the 1950s and 1960s that we tend to associate with this music, with their thin, top-heavy sound and unyielding wind supply. While it is true that the organs of northern Europe ostensibly provided the inspiration for this style, it is more of the letter than the spirit. They look all right on paper, but lack the substance to deliver musically. The instruments for which Buxtehude, Bruhns and Böhm wrote are red-blooded, warm, and colorful, with seeming faults–such as unequal temperament and wind systems of uncertain equilibrium–that turn to virtues when the right music is played on them.

Odd Fellows Chamber Music for 2013 will be in October this year To Participants in the Odd Fellows Youth Chamber Music Project: Because an elevator is being installed at the Lodge, probably during August, we have to change the date: Instead of the two-week August program, we will be holding a weekend Baroque Festival in October, with an emphasis on Bach. There will be groups of all sizes and levels. The Program will take place on October 19th and 20th, 2013. We will rehearse from 9:30 AM to 12 Noon, and from 1 PM to 5PM, on Saturday. We’ll be feeding you during the lunch break. The performance will be at 3 PM on Sunday October 20th. Reception after. We’ll still be keeping one person on each part, and without Conductors. We will be sending out applications soon. Probably the deadline will be July 1st. Hope you all can make it. If you know of anyone who has played in the past who hasn’t gotten this invitation, please have them contact us. We’re trying not leave anyone out. Cathy O’Connor Ted Seitz Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Good luck. For most of my generation, it would just go to student debt and cocktails. If anything came to me (an impossibility), I would dump it into a poorly managed career in edgy luxury items. You can’t make opera money on perfume that smells like cunts and gasoline. At any rate, I didn’t usually make an appearance beyond the gala. Or, I hadn’t until recently. But Joseph Eisner had promised me a fortune, and now he wouldn’t take my calls. He did, however, like his chamber music. It had been an acquired taste for me. In my distant undergraduate past, when circumstance sat me in front of an ensemble, I spent the first five minutes of each concert deciding which musician I would fuck if I had the chance, and the rest shifting minutely in my seat. I still couldn’t stand Chanel. And while I had learned to appreciate—indeed, enjoy—chamber ensembles, orchestras, and on occasion even the opera, I retained my former habit as a dirty amusement to add some private savor to the proceedings. Tonight, it was the violist, weaving and bobbing his way through Dvořák’s Terzetto in C Major like a sinuous dancer. I prefer the romantics—fewer hair-raising harmonies than modern fare, and certainly more engaging than funereal baroque. The intriguing arrangement of the terzetto kept me engaged, in that slightly detached and floating manner engendered by instrumental performance. Moreover, the woman to my left, one row ahead, was wearing Salome by Papillon. The simple fact of anyone wearing such a scent in public pleased me. So few people dared wear anything at all these days, and when they did, it was inevitably staid: an inoffensive classic or antiseptic citrus-and-powder. But this perfume was one I might have worn myself. Jasmine, yes, but more indolic than your average floral. People sometimes say it smells like dirty panties. As the trio wrapped up for intermission, I took a steadying breath of musk and straightened my lapels. The music was only a means to an end, after all.

Let us mention an additional source of difficulty: the dissociation between exterior worship and interior prayer introduced into the Catholic way of thinking. In the West, when the liturgy had become the business of clerics, celebrated in a learned tongue unknown to the people, preachers developed private devotions and exercises. Then worship was seen as an external manifestation, a duty rendered to God and requiring care for the appearances, such as baroque music, processions, decorations, but not demanding too great a personal investment. Religious education stressed the individual relation to God, to such a point that during solemn liturgical celebrations one could see priests individually reciting their breviary, while seated side by side in the sanctuary, and the faithful silently praying the rosary as their confessors had advised! In catechisms, worship was included in the chapter on moral obligations; it was regarded as the social form of the virtue of religion, that is, the fulfillment of the duties we have toward God.

Mozart began composing highly intricate pieces of music in a period of time when the most popular genre of music was style galant—an elegant genre to be sure, but defined by the simplicity of its structure. The style galant was in and of itself a reaction to the musical style that had come directly before it, commonly referred to as the Baroque period. Music in the Baroque style was highly embellished, defined by the use of ornamentation, or unnecessarily complicated measures inserted throughout the piece of music. Critics of the period were quick to say that the Baroque style lacked a coherent melody and was largely dissonant, even to the trained ear. Popular musical forms in the Baroque period included sonatas and cantatas, the former of which Mozart would return to and utilize toward the end of his career. Baroque music was defined by its seriousness—it was often cited as being largely unpleasant to listen to unless one was a musician oneself. The style galant, in response, depended on its light-heartedness and its wide range of appeal to a variety of audiences. The Classical style, which Mozart and his peers pioneered, was another response to the oversimplification of popular music that the style galant characterized. As previously discussed, Mozart spent a great deal of his early years in Paris studying the works of Baroque masters Bach and Handel, and that period of music greatly influenced many of his most recognizable works. Mozart, however, had the talent (and the distance from the period when Baroque music was at its height) to study the most valid criticisms of the Baroque style and pick and choose the intricacies of the style that worked, while discarding the ones that did not. He was able to adapt the dated style to form a completely new aesthetic while steering popular music back toward the trend of compositions that were more complex than the style galant afforded.

Scandalous as it may sound, it is even possible that the world's greatest cello music was not in fact written for a cello.

One hundred years of solitude. "There is always something left to love." I think about wanting you back. I think of not wanting you back. And all the things in between. Sometimes I miss you. Sometimes I don't. Like my weakness, I go back to remembering you all the time. So I built myself an imaginary friend, wandered through all its dark shelves. I made it home. I brought genie out of its bottle. I didn't want a wish because you are a dangerous thing to have. I've been there before, and nothing came out of it. I listened to music. All those tears rushed back in. I remembered the dream I had once. I thought I had prayed it away. Then I realized, "I only delayed it." My vulnerabilities started coming in. "Do I terrify?" But no, even my imaginary friend leaves me. And I realize that, "Hey, this is who I am." I have to make the best of this. I have to make your emptiness home. I have to write you away. Perhaps that'll bring the clarity. And these last tears will be the last to fall for you

Chopin had Roses on the piano for shoes on the late tones.

Burgling your way out of yourself, quietly, subtly, slipping away from yourself as light slips away from a room when night falls (though night does not fall; objects secrete it at the end of the day when, in their tiredness, they exile themselves in their silence). Grey, still day, like a perpetual dawn. The birds themselves were deceived by it. They went on singing all day, even though daybreak never came. It is Sunday 13 May, 6 p.m. Is this a good or a bad thing? As evening comes on, a cold silent wind gets up. All we need is a heat storm to put the finishing touch to the unreality of the season. And yet the birds are singing and men are thinking, on this Sunday, in secret. They are warding off the absence of sun and the monotony of Sunday. They are dreaming of the marriage of sun and sand. They are dreaming of fogging up the mirrors and each shining forth in his own madness. They are listening to a piece of baroque music: 'Whence comes, whence comes such a loneliness?

Opera was born in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century. It derived almost seamlessly from its immediate precursor, the intermedio, or lavish between-the-acts spectacle presented in conjunction with a play on festive occasions. Plays were spoken, and their stage settings were simple: a street backed by palace facades for tragedies, by lower-class houses for comedies; for satyr plays or pastorals, the setting was a woodland or country scene. Meanwhile the ever-growing magnificence of state celebrations in Medici Florence on occasions such as dynastic weddings gave rise to a variety of spectacles involving exuberant scenic displays: naval battles in the flooded courtyard of the Pitti Palace, tournaments in the squares, triumphal entries into the city. These all called upon the services of architects, machinists, costume designers, instrumental and vocal artists. Such visual and aural delights also found their way into the theater—not in plays, with their traditional, sober settings, but between the acts of plays. Intermedi had everything the plays had not: miraculous transformations of scenery, flying creatures (both natural and supernatural), dancing, singing. The plays satisfied Renaissance intellects imbued with classical culture; the intermedi fed the new Baroque craving for the marvelous, the incredible, the impossible. By all accounts, no Medici festivities were as grand and lavish as those held through much of the month of May 1589 in conjunction with the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinand I and Christine of Lorraine. The intermedi produced between the acts of a comedy on the evening of May 2 were considered to be the highlight of the entire occasion and were repeated, with different plays, on May 6 and 13. Nearly all the main figures we will read about in connection with the birth of opera took part in the extravagant production, which was many months in the making: Emilio de' Cavalieri acted as intermediary between the court and the theater besides being responsible for the actors and musicians and composing some of the music; Giovanni Bardi conceived the scenarios for the six intermedi and saw to it that his highly allegorical allusions were made clear in the realization. Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini were among the featured singers, as was the madrigal composer Luca Marenzio, who wrote the music for Intermedio 3, described below. The poet responsible for the musical texts, finally, was Ottavio Rinuccini, who wrote the poetry for the earliest operas...

Melody, for Baroque composers, is prose, not poetry. It does not come in paired lines (like a folk song, or a Schubert Lied), but in rhetorical sentences or paragraphs.