Classical Musicians Quotes

But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.

Well, I’ve been a musician my whole life. When I was two, I would sing the theme from Star Wars in my crib; my mom taped it for proof. Then, when I was five, I asked for a violin. No one knew why I would want one, but my wish was granted and I ended up a classically trained fiddler by age 12. The only problem with that was, when you’re a classical violinist, everybody expects you to be satisfied with playing Tchaikovsky for the rest of your life, and saying you want to play jazz, rock, write songs, sing your songs, hook up your fiddle to a guitar amp, sleep with your 4-track recorder, mess around with synths, dress like Tinkerbell in combat boots, AND play Tchaikovsky is equivalent to spitting on the Pope.

Am I in love? Absolutely. I’m in love with ancient philosophers, foreign painters, classic authors, and musicians who have died long ago. I’m a passionate lover. I fawn over these people. I have given them my heart and my soul. The trouble is, I’m unable to love anyone tangible. I have sacrificed a physical bond, for a metaphysical relationship. I am the ultimate idealistic lover.

The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.

Who Am I? I’m a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer’s heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes. I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do. I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me.

I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end.

It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.

If a musician wants to become a fine artist, he must first become a finer person.

The Frays had never been a religiously observant family, but Clary loved Fifth Avenue at Christmas time. The air smelled like sweet roasted chestnuts, and the window displays sparkled with silver and blue, green and red. This year there were fat round crystal snowflakes attached to each lamppost, sending back the winter sunlight in shafts of gold. Not to mention the huge tree at Rockefeller Center. It threw its shadow across them as she and Simon draped themselves over the gate at the side of the skating rink, watching tourists fall down as they tried to navigate the ice. Clary had a hot chocolate wrapped in her hands, the warmth spreading through her body. She felt almost normal—this, coming to Fifth to see the window displays and the tree, had been a winter tradition for her and Simon for as long as she could remember. “Feels like old times, doesn’t it?” he said, echoing her thoughts as he propped his chin on his folded arms. She chanced a sideways look at him. He was wearing a black topcoat and scarf that emphasized the winter pallor of his skin. His eyes were shadowed, indicating that he hadn’t fed on blood recently. He looked like what he was—a hungry, tired vampire. Well, she thought. Almost like old times. “More people to buy presents for,” she said. “Plus, the always traumatic what-to-buy-someone-for-the-first-Christmas-after-you’ve-started-dating question.” “What to get the Shadowhunter who has everything,” Simon said with a grin. “Jace mostly likes weapons,” Clary sighed. “He likes books, but they have a huge library at the Institute. He likes classical music …” She brightened. Simon was a musician; even though his band was terrible, and was always changing their name—currently they were Lethal Soufflé—he did have training. “What would you give someone who likes to play the piano?” “A piano.” “Simon.” “A really huge metronome that could also double as a weapon?” Clary sighed, exasperated. “Sheet music. Rachmaninoff is tough stuff, but he likes a challenge.” “Now you’re talking. I’m going to see if there’s a music store around here.” Clary, done with her hot chocolate, tossed the cup into a nearby trash can and pulled her phone out. “What about you? What are you giving Isabelle?” “I have absolutely no idea,” Simon said. They had started heading toward the avenue, where a steady stream of pedestrians gawking at the windows clogged the streets. “Oh, come on. Isabelle’s easy.” “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.” Simon’s brows drew together. “I think. I’m not sure. We haven’t discussed it. The relationship, I mean.” “You really have to DTR, Simon.” “What?” “Define the relationship. What it is, where it’s going. Are you boyfriend and girlfriend, just having fun, ‘it’s complicated,’ or what? When’s she going to tell her parents? Are you allowed to see other people?” Simon blanched. “What? Seriously?” “Seriously. In the meantime—perfume!” Clary grabbed Simon by the back of his coat and hauled him into a cosmetics store that had once been a bank. It was massive on the inside, with rows of gleaming bottles everywhere. “And something unusual,” she said, heading for the fragrance area. “Isabelle isn’t going to want to smell like everyone else. She’s going to want to smell like figs, or vetiver, or—” “Figs? Figs have a smell?” Simon looked horrified; Clary was about to laugh at him when her phone buzzed. It was her mother. where are you? It’s an emergency.

Our caste was just three away from the bottom. We were artists. And artists and classical musicians were only three steps up from dirt. Literally. Our money was stretched as tight as a high wire, and our income was highly dependent on the changing seasons.

You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, “In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.

This writer, he was going on about the lyrics to "Champagne Supernova", and he actually said to me: ‘You know, the one thing that’s stopping it being a classic is the ridiculous lyrics.’ And I went: ‘What do you mean by that?’ And he said: ‘Well, Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball — what’s that mean?’ And I went: ‘I don’t fucking know. But are you telling me, when you’ve got 60,000 people singing it, they don’t know what it means? It means something different to every one of them.

Liberace was certainly master and commander of the ivories ~ he is the only pianist I can watch or listen to without suffering a case of 'Stagefright Sympathy Sickness'.

A cough is the basic sign of inattention. Musicians never, in my experience, cough when playing in public.

My gaze returns to earth and when it does, it’s her eyes I see. Not the way I used to see them—around every corner, behind my own closed lids at the start of each day. Not in the way I used to imagine them in the eyes of every other girl I laid on top of. No, this time it really is her eyes. A photo of her, dressed in black, a cello leaning against one shoulder like a tired child. Her hair is up in one of those buns that seem to be a requisite for classical musicians. She used to wear it up like that for recitals and chamber music concerts, but with little pieces hanging down, to soften the severity of the look. There are no tendrils in this photo. I peer closer at the sign. YOUNG CONCERT SERIES PRESENTS MIA HALL.

I’m the lady by day, and I’m Gaga by night. And I’m always going to be that way, because it’s a testament to your discipline as a musician. I do like to drink, I like to get crazy, I like to go out with my friends, and I like to sing rock and roll. I used to go-go dance! And I like to be inspired by young artists, people like Millie who are outrageously hard, disciplined individuals. But at the end of the day I’m a classically trained pianist and I’m a singer, and that’s what allows the girl that goes out at night to also go on stage with Tony Bennett at Lincoln Center. Because I know how to do it.

The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all time are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all time. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics, instead, are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers.

there was yet the assurance of such power in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to be merely running over the chords of our appetite with preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had mastered

That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain— indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies. 12 Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras. Bach, for his part, composed so prolifically that it would take decades of work merely to hand- copy his scores, yet only a small fraction of this prodigious output is commonly performed.

Say what you will about classical music, one thing it has going for it is that it lets your mind wander. Rock bands, blues bands—and yes, salsa bands too—they’re all intent on securing your undivided attention. That’s what the drums and amplifiers are there for. But classical musicians seem more willing to let you settle down, settle in, and follow your thoughts wheresoever they might lead you.

The year 1968 was also ground zero for popular music in Germany. Karl Bartos, in 1968 a 16-year-old gifted classical musician, puts it like this: ‘We don’t have the blues in our genes and we weren’t born in the Mississippi Delta. There were no black people in Germany. So instead we thought we’d had this development in the twenties which was very, very strong and was audio-visual. We had the Bauhaus school before the war; and then after the war we had tremendous people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and the development of the classical and the electronic classical. This was very strong and it all happened very close to Düsseldorf, in Cologne, and all the great composers at that time came there. During the late forties up until the seventies they all came to Germany; people like John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer, and they all had this fantastic approach to modern music, and we felt it would make more sense to see Kraftwerk as part of that tradition more than anything else.

Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich's surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you. (Response to a letter from an unemployed professional musician)

California nurse Jared Axen was holding a dying hospice patient’s hand when he began to sing an old hymn. The woman, who didn’t speak English, hadn’t been responsive in days. But when Axen sang to her, she squeezed his hand, a response that soothed the woman’s family. Six years later, Axen, a classically trained musician, sings to some of his patients every day. “It gives them their humanity back,” he said. “Music is a common language that helps me connect with my patients.” Many patients also claim to feel better and to need fewer pain medications, Axen said. “It’s become a vital tool for my patients and their families.

I decided to take my time getting ready, and looked cautiously at myself in the mirror while the shower warmed up. Could I ever become a musician’s muse? I wondered. What was a muse, anyway? I was familiar with the classical allusion, of course, but, in modern-day, practical terms, a muse seemed simply to be an attractive woman whom the artist wanted to sleep with.

instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

The orchestra musician’s plight caught the interest of Harvard researcher Richard Hackman, who was studying the job satisfaction of workers employed in a variety of industries. Orchestral musicians were near the bottom, scoring lower in job satisfaction and overall happiness than airline flight attendants, mental health treatment teams, beer salesmen, government economic analysts, and even federal prison guards. Only operating room nurses and semiconductor fabrication teams scored lower than these musicians.

When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall. After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers’ heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn’t watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank and clatter of shattered stained glass raining to the cathedral’s stone floor. But for the most part the music played sweetly, until it didn’t. Then there was nothing.

What about concerts and opera performances? Nowadays these bring him little pleasure [...] These people have no interest in classical music - they would much prefer operettas or films with Marika Rokk[...] How can he possibly enjoy music under such circumstances? What good is it to invite the finest musicians and conductors of the Reich to Prague, when they must perform for such uneducated audience, who applaud only dutifully and never with enthusiasm. And, of course, the artists sense this immediately; they have a well-developed instinct about their audiences. Therefore, they play and sing any old way, without distinction.

Sometimes guitar riffs get repeated over and over ("vamping," in the lingo of musicians), but generally there is a soloist proving variation that runs above that background, lest the song sound monotonous. Philip Glass's minimalist compositions (such as the soundtrack to 'Koyaanisqatsi') deviate from much of the classical music that preceded them, with much less obvious movement than, say, the Romantic-era compositions that his work seems to rebel against, yet his works, too, consist not only of extensive repetition but also of constant (though subtle) variation. Virtually every song you've ever heard consists of exactly that: themes that recur over and over, overlaid with variations.

Here’s a valuable lesson I’ve learned from working as a music journalist for nearly twenty years: if given the choice between interviewing a hip, up-and-coming musician and interviewing a past-his-prime has-been, take the has-been every single time. Some of my favorite interviews ever are with artists whose music I don’t even like. I’m talking about the time that Poison guitarist C. C. DeVille told me about how he used to drink paint thinner when he ran out of booze. Or when Kip Winger told me he still hates Lars Ulrich for throwing a dart at a Winger poster in Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” video. Has-beens have nothing to lose, whereas younger, hipper artists must think politically, as being candid can hurt you in the long run.

When natural music is heightened and polished by art, there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent (for it cannot be wholly seized or understood) the great and perfect wisdom of God in His marvellous work of music. In which this is most singular and indeed astonishing: that one man sings a simple tune or tenor (as musicians call it), together with which three, four, or five voices also sing, which, as it were, play and skip delightedly round this simple tune or tenor, and wonderfully grace and adorn the said tune with manifold devices and sounds, performing as it were a heavenly dance, so that those who at all understand it and are moved by it must be greatly amazed and believe that there is nothing more extraordinary in the world than such a song adorned with many voices.

When natural music is heightened and polished by art”, he said once, “there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent, (for it cannot be wholly seized or understood) the great and perfect wisdom of God in His marvellous work of music, in which this is most singular and indeed astonishing, that one man sings a simple tune or tenor (as musicians call it), together with which three, four or five voices also sing, which as it were play and skip delightedly round this simple tune or tenor, and wonderfully grace and adorn the said tune with manifold devices and sounds, performing as it were a heavenly dance, so that those who at all understand it and are moved by it must be greatly amazed, and believe that there is nothing more extraordinary in the world than such a song adorned with many voices.

You okay, Bobert?” He says pretty much what I expect: “I don’t know how I’m going to pair Ramón. He’ll drown Lisa.” Robert’s pianist, a man named Luther, is pretty wonderful. “Can Luther carry the solos?” “On piano?” I shrug. “Just spitballing here.” He appears to consider it, and then shakes his head. “The songs don’t lend themselves to keys. The strings have a richness, a vibrancy that the piano can’t mimic. It needs to stir something inside you. Luther is amazing, but we need a musician who demands your attention. Who makes you feel.” The idea seems to heat my blood, and I straighten. “Wait. Wait.” Robert looks up, confused. I hold up my hand. “An idea is forming in my brain.” His expression clears in understanding. “No, Buttercup.” “He’s exactly what you’re describing,” I insist. “You’ve never heard him, but trust me—he is.” “He plays guitar. Honey, I know you’re enamored, but—” “It’s not that, I swear. And he’s not just some busker hanging out on the street. He’s gifted, Robert. Listening to him play is like watching Luis onstage. I feel the notes. I know I’m not . . .” I search for words, flushing. Trying to tell Robert how to do his job is dangerous; he may be my uncle, but he’s been a brilliant musician for much longer. “I’m not a trained musician like you are,” I say carefully, “but I feel like classical guitar might work here. It’s gentle, and soft, yes, but has the passion and—the vibrancy you mention? It has that. If we’re changing the sound entirely by bringing in Ramón, why not change it this way, too? Have a guitar sing with Ramón, instead of a violin?” Robert stares at me, speechless. “Just come with me once.” I grow dizzy from the awareness that I might be convincing him. “Once. That’s all it will take. I know it.

I lived in New York City back in the 1980s, which is when the Bordertown series was created. New York was a different place then -- dirtier, edgier, more dangerous, but also in some ways more exciting. The downtown music scene was exploding -- punk and folk music were everywhere -- and it wasn't as expensive to live there then, so a lot of young artists, musicians, writers, etc. etc. were all living and doing crazy things in scruffy neighborhoods like the East Village. I was a Fantasy Editor for a publishing company back then -- but in those days, "fantasy" to most people meant "imaginary world" books, like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. A number of the younger writers in the field, however, wanted to create a branch of fantasy that was rooted in contemporary, urban North America, rather than medieval or pastoral Europe. I'd already been working with some of these folks (Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, etc.), who were writing novels that would become the foundations for the current Urban Fantasy field. At the time, these kinds of stories were considered so strange and different, it was actually hard to get them into print. When I was asked by a publishing company to create a shared-world anthology for Young Adult readers, I wanted to create an Urban Fantasy setting that was something like a magical version of New York...but I didn't want it to actually be New York. I want it to be any city and every city -- a place that anyone from anywhere could go to or relate to. The idea of placing it on the border of Elfland came from the fact that I'd just re-read a fantasy classic called The King of Elfland's Daughter by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany. I love stories that take place on the borderlands between two different worlds...and so I borrowed this concept, but adapted it to a modern, punky, urban setting. I drew upon elements of the various cities I knew best -- New York, Boston, London, Dublin, maybe even a little of Mexico City, where I'd been for a little while as a teen -- and scrambled them up and turned them into Bordertown. There actually IS a Mad River in southern Ohio (where I went to college) and I always thought that was a great name, so I imported it to Bordertown. As for the water being red, that came from the river of blood in the Scottish folk ballad "Thomas the Rhymer," which Thomas must cross to get into Elfland. [speaking about the Borderland series she "founded" and how she came up with the setting. Link to source; Q&A with Holly, Ellen & Terri!]

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.

Now, who and what is this minstrel in reality? Where does he come from? In what respects does he differ from his predecessors? He has been described as a cross between the early medieval court-singer and the ancient mime of classical times. The mime had never ceased to flourish since the days of classical antiquity; when even the last traces of classical culture disappeared, the descendants of the old mimes still continued to travel about the Empire, entertaining the masses with their unpretentious, unsophisticated and unliterary art. The Germanic countries were flooded out with mimes in the early Middle Ages; but until the ninth century the poets and singers at the courts kept themselves strictly apart from them. Not until they lost their cultured audience, as a result of the Carolingian Renaissance and the clericalism of the following generation, and came up against the competition of the mimes in the lower classes, did they have, to a certain extent, to become mimes themselves in order to be able to compete with their rivals. Thus both singers and comedians now move in the same circles, intermingle and influence each other so much that they soon become indistinguishable from one another. The mime and the scop both become the minstrel. The most striking characteristic of the minstrel is his versatility. The place of the cultured, highly specialized heroic ballad poet is now taken by the Jack of all trades, who is no longer merely a poet and singer, but also a musician and dancer, dramatist and actor, clown and acrobat, juggler and bear-leader, in a word, the universal jester and maître de plaisir of the age. Specialization, distinction and solemn dignity are now finished with; the court poet has become everybody’s fool and his social degradation has such a revolutionary and shattering effect on himself that he never entirely recovers from the shock. From now on he is one of the déclassés, in the same class as tramps and prostitutes, runaway clerics and sent-down students, charlatans and beggars. He has been called the ‘journalist of the age’, but he really goes in for entertainment of every kind: the dancing song as well as the satirical song, the fairy story as well as the mime, the legend of saints as well as the heroic epic. In this context, however, the epic takes on quite new features: it acquires in places a more pointed character with a new straining after effect, which was absolutely foreign to the spirit of the old heroic ballad. The minstrel no longer strikes the gloomy, solemn, tragi-heroic note of the ‘Hildebrandslied’, for he wants to make even the epic sound entertaining; he tries to provide sensations, effective climaxes and lively epigrams. Compared with the monuments of the older heroic poetry, the ‘Chanson de Roland’ never fails to reveal this popular minstrel taste for the piquant.

It’s hard to imagine a time when French writers were uncertain about the legitimacy and importance of their language, but that was the case in the sixteenth century. French was considered appropriate for vulgar (that is, popular) writing or for old medieval poetic forms such as rondeaux or madrigals, but not for “higher” forms of writing, higher learning or the sciences, which were still the exclusive domain of Latin. While François I didn’t regulate French in any way, his policies did legitimize the efforts of the many artists, poets, savants and printers who were trying to dump Latin and make French prestigious by inserting it into the language of state administration, universities and spheres of higher learning such as medicine and poetry. In some ways writers led the way in this movement. The most militant anti-Latin lobby in France was a group of poets originally called the Brigade who were soon to choose a more poetic name: La Pléiade. They were up-and-coming writers who wanted to position themselves as a literary avant-garde. Their manifesto, Déffence et illustration de la langue Françoyse (Defence and Illustration of the French Language), was an indictment of Latin in favour of French. It was published in 1549, ten years after the publication of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. Signed by the poet Joachim Du Bellay, it begged poets to use French for the new-found forms of classic Greek and Latin literature—the ode, the elegy, and comedy and tragedy (these were, of course, very old forms, but they were only just being rediscovered after having been forgotten for more than a thousand years). In a chapter titled “Exhortation to Frenchmen,” Du Bellay wonders, “Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why do we use foreign languages as if we were ashamed to use our own?…Thou must not be ashamed of writing in thy own language.” The debate is surprisingly similar to the twentieth-century one in which French musicians wondered if it was possible to make rock ’n’ roll in their own language. François I’s policies definitely added weight to the case made by Du Bellay and the Pléiade poets. While Du Bellay’s Déffence was in many ways a squabble between poets over their art, it also contained a program for the promotion of French in science and art.

Alapana In manodharma sangita, the principal vehicle of exploring a raga’s identity is the alapana, which in Sanskrit means ‘to speak, address, convey, communicate’. In the context of classical music, alapana is the opening of a raga that brings forth all of its facets without the use of other elements, like sahitya or tala. The focus of this exercise is entirely on the exploration of the raga. How does one explore a raga? We have already discussed what a raga is and the various factors that go into the making of its identity. A musician should have internalized the different facets of a raga before attempting to present an alapana in that raga. The resources needed for internalizing a raga lie, of course, in the numerous compositions that have been created by vaggeyakaras in the raga. In order to present the raga in an alapana, the musician needs clarity regarding the essential svaras, phrases and movements. A similar internalization exists in the mind of the musically attuned listener. In this commonality of cognition between the musician and listener is the raga’s identity. It is this internalized rendering of a raga that best reflects what is referred to as the musician’s manodharma. So closely integrated is the singer’s manodharma with the raga’s identity in an alapana that the alapana becomes synonymous with the raga.

Castles made of sand slip into the sea eventually ~ JIMI HENDRIX, MUSICIAN

Sometimes people claim they don't need a crutch like Jesus, but he's not a crutch, he's a teacher. If you want to be a writer, you read the classics. If you want to make great music you listen to music that's been made by great musicians who have gone before. If you're studying to be a painter, it's a good idea to study the great masters. If Picasso came into your room while you were learning to draw and said 'Hi, I have a couple of hours would you like some hints?' would you say no? So it is with spiritual masters: Jesus, Buddha or any other enlightened being. They're geniuses in the way they used their minds and hearts just as Beethoven was a genius with music, or Shakespeare a genius with words. Why not learn from them, follow their lead, study what they were doing right.

The moment when it crystallized for me was in early 1999. Due to the vicissitudes of my freelancing schedule, I ended up playing Holst’s The Planets three times with three different orchestras in a six-month period. Maybe you know that piece. There are recycled versions of it in everything John Williams swiped for the Star Wars movies and everything bombastic and shallow you’ve ever been annoyed by in every action movie of the last twenty years, plus the horrible Phrygian raised fourth that was everywhere in early twentieth-century English classical music (I’m talking to you, Gordon Jacob, and you, Edward Elgar). The Planets, along with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, had been grating on me more and more with each passing year of being a musician. Playing The Planets with three orchestras within a year, this time as clarinet two in the Modesto Symphony, made me realize that if I played it one more time, I would go on a rampage and hurt people with my clarinets. I needed a plan B, and coffee was all I could imagine.

Hong Kong Cha-Cha Champion of 1957. And just as he could pick up dance steps after being shown them only once, so he had an instant understanding of any martial art he encountered — whether Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Filipino — or Western techniques of fencing or boxing. In parallel with his acting career, Bruce Lee was also the catalyst for the hybridization of martial art styles — a unique approach to the subject that eventually led to the ‘mixed martial art’ and ‘ultimate fighting’ of today. Bruce’s intentions have often been misunderstood by some in the martial arts community, who believe he was accumulating every possible technique he could, so as to create a total armoury. But for Bruce, it was the shared principles behind all the various techniques that were far more important than acquiring a vast catalogue of moves. I do not fear the man who has practiced ten-thousand kicks once. But I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten-thousand times. In his view, a martial artist shouldn’t set out to compile an encyclopedia of styles any more than a musician should.  After all, would the ultimate musician be one who learned every jazz lick he could, every blues lick, every classical piece, and pop tune — along with the folk music of Kazakhstan — which he then tried to cobble together into one unholy racket?

Conversely, animals can be quite sensitive to human music. There are stories of dogs who hide under the couch for piano works by atonal composers but not for those by, say, Mozart. One music teacher told me that her dog would heave an audible sigh of relief if she stopped playing complex, fast-moving pieces by Franz Liszt and proceeded to something calmer. And there are reports of cows that produce more milk listening to Beethoven (although, if this is true, shouldn't one hear more classical music on farms?). Birds listen as carefully to sounds as any musician. They have to, because they learn from each other. Many birds are not born with the song they sing: the symphonies they offer us for free in forests and meadows are cultural. White-crowned sparrows, for example, develop their normal song only when they have been exposed early in life to the sounds of an adult of their species. Many songbirds have dialects-differences in song structure from one population to another. One theory about this is that if a female can tell from a male's song that he is a local boy, she may prefer him as a mate, as he may be genetically adapted to regional conditions. Given the variability in song from location to location it is hard to maintain that birdsong is instinctive in the usual sense. There is room for creativity and modification. Some individuals act as star performers, setting new trends in their region.

Bring it. Just fucking bring it. Stand tall, Grandma Nora had told him: he would stand tall, with the spotlights shining on his face, and his music would pour into all their ears, and they would understand that no matter what anybody threw at him, he was not going away He was not stooping to their level. The air-conditioning could go off and he could melt. They could toss any piece of crappy music they wanted at him and he would play. He would not be ignored or denied or embarrassed ever again: he was a musician, and music had no color.

Music is for everyone. It’s not—or at least shouldn’t be—an elitist, aristocratic club that you need a membership card to appreciate: it’s a language, it’s a means of connecting us that is beyond color, beyond race, beyond the shape of your face or the size of your stock portfolio. Musicians of color, however, are severely underrepresented in the classical music world—and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. Look up the statistics: 1.8 percent of musicians performing in classical symphonies are Black; 12 percent are people of color. But for me, day to day, performance by performance, it wasn’t about being a statistic: it was about trying to live my life and play the music that I loved, and often being

Partly thanks to Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, Finnish musical education is among the best in the world, with Finnish conductors, singers and musicians performing with some of the world’s top orchestras. There are some excellent classical-music festivals in Finland.

The word listen contains the same letters as the word silent. — Alfred Brendel, classical musician54 —

That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain—indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies.12 Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras. Bach, for his part, composed so prolifically that it would take decades of work merely to hand-copy his scores, yet only a small fraction of this prodigious output is commonly performed. The same thing applies to the output of the other three members of this group of hyper-dominant composers: only a small fraction of their work is still widely played. Thus, a small fraction of the music composed by a small fraction of all the classical composers who have ever composed makes up almost all the classical music that the world knows and loves.

When he’d first tried his hand at jazz, it was a mess. Like most classically trained musicians who relied on strict training, he was most comfortable following the road map that a composer laid out. Ray would pour himself onto the classical route, which had clear signposts and a yellow line down one side. With jazz, there were no signs; the GPS just said, “Go.” Jazz charts provided a simple melody he was just supposed to riff from—he wanted to read every note, lock in on each finger pattern. How would he even begin? He started by listening to the opening melody of a song, then adding a few notes in the same key, then changing the key for a while, then somehow, miraculously, returning to the original key, all while making it seem effortless. This took a lot of practice. When he thought he had it, he had to think again. It was fun, challenging, and exercised new muscles in his playing.

The most common cycle used is the sixteen beat cycle, called teentaal or tritaal. Dha dhin dhin dha. Dha dhin dhin dha. Dha tin tin ta. Ta dhin dhin dha…sixteen beats divided neatly into four times four. The sixteen-beat cycle starts and ends and stars and ends, creating a repetitive circularity; the melody has to accommodate itself within its scaffolding; it has to negotiate with the parameters to find a happy balance between freedom and responsibility, rights and duties, exhilaration and restraint. There is scope for risk-taking, within reason, as long as one came back to the line of control in time, and hit sama, the drum stroke where one cycle ended and the new one began; a point of arrival and of departure. This is a musical metaphor for life as it should be lived. Truly great musicians can swerve into unchartered bylanes, but still find their way back to the destination. On time

*Note: if any of the musicians listed in the sections above is a full-time participant in one or more ensembles specializing in historical performance or contemporary music, they will display fewer of the characteristics I have described above and behave, instead, like vegans. Not Hollywood vegans, whose activism is displayed in a glossier, trendier way, but the kinds of vegans you find hiking the Appalachian Trail or existing in any place called “Portland.

Moon River” started to flow gracefully out of the violin. The notes crept over to me and danced along the goosebumps on my skin.

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Paul Humphreys: In some ways it was a bit annoying when we found out about the likes of Gary Numan and the Human League, because we thought we’d found our alternative music, and all of a sudden we realised that all around the north of England people were listening to the same things we were – Kraftwerk and Neu! and Bowie and Roxy. Everyone had discovered synth. Synth was this new way to make music, this huge palette of sounds that had never been heard before. Our biggest influence was Kraftwerk, because they were classically trained musicians and so included harmonic structures in what they did. They were brilliant, but they did it in the simplest way. Simplicity, but with great melodies

Americans invented jazz; the French, Brazilians and Japanese also understand it. It is important to have formal training in the classical repertoire, but a true musician is not a train which can only run on the rails. My mother admired Bill Evans.

There was nothing fake about Lisa. The more I thought about my made-up name, the phonier it felt to me. I wasn’t Romeo. I wasn’t Blue. I wasn’t some fabricated wannabe. I was a musician dead set on being real. It suddenly became clear that my pseudonym was getting in the way of that. It was the immature me looking to be cool. But coolness comes from within. You can’t fake it. You can’t name it into being. You have to grow it organically. I had a lot invested in Romeo Blue. I thought of him as an alter ego, without any of the problems facing Lennie. When I first came up with this new identity, it gave me confidence. But now it felt false. Romeo Blue was out. But what name was in? At first, I thought I’d go to the other extreme and call myself Leonard Kravitzky (my grandfather’s real last name before he hit Ellis Island); I actually ordered business cards carrying that name. Looking at them, though, I felt it was just too classical, like “Igor Stravinsky.” No, the easiest answer was the simplest: the real me, the real name. The only change was in the spelling: “Lennie” became “Lenny” because, on paper, I liked the shape of the y more than the ie. It looked stronger. I was Lenny Kravitz. Despite the name I’d invented and the image I’d adopted, I’d always been Lenny Kravitz. But it took Lisa to inspire me to find myself.

Music is the outward and audible signification of inward and spiritual realities.

Music, being identical with heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It's a condition of eternity.

1973 was the year when the United Kingdom entered the European Economic Union, the year when Watergate helped us with a name for all future scandals, Carly Simon began the year at number one with ‘You’re So Vain’, John Tavener premiered his Variations on ‘Three Blind Mice’ for orchestra, the year when The Godfather won Best Picture Oscar, when the Bond film was Live and Let Die, when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, opened, when Sofia Gubaidulina’s Roses for piano and soprano premiered in Moscow, when David Bowie was Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed walked on the wild side and made up a ‘Berlin’, Slade were feeling the noize, Dobie Gray was drifting away, Bruce Springsteen was ‘Blinded by the Light’, Tom Waits was calling ‘Closing Time’, Bob Dylan was ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, Sly and the Family Stone were ‘Fresh’, Queen recorded their first radio session for John Peel, when Marvin Gaye sang ‘What’s Going On’ and Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, when Morton Feldman’s Voices and Instruments II for three female voices, flute, two cellos and bass, Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style for violin and piano and Iannis Xenakis’s Eridanos for brass and strings premiered, when Ian Carr’s Nucleus released two albums refining their tangy English survey of the current jazz-rock mind of Miles Davis, when Ornette Coleman started recording again after a five-year pause, making a field recording in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, when Stevie Wonder reached No. 1 with ‘Superstition’ and ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, when Free, Family and the Byrds played their last show, 10cc played their first, the Everly Brothers split up, Gram Parsons died, and DJ Kool Herc DJed his first block party for his sister’s birthday in the Bronx, New York, where he mixed instrumental sections of two copies of the same record using two turntables.

Larry Page probably never listened to early Louis Armstrong records, in which the notion of time is reinvented. Armstrong threw away the classical meanings of time, which he had learned in the marching bands of New Orleans, and replaced it with a slippery push-pull syncopation that would come to define the idea of swing. Perhaps we can get a small insight from this into the culture clash between the nerds and the artists. The time clock in a computer is unforgiving, but a great musician often plays behind the beat.

and recrimination.  late 17th cent.: from early modern Dutch (denoting a mythical whirlpool supposed to exist in the Arctic Ocean, west of Norway), from maalen 'grind, whirl' + stroom 'stream'. mae·nad   n. (in ancient Greece) a female follower of Bacchus, traditionally associated with divine possession and frenzied rites.   mae·nad·icadj.  late 16th cent.: via Latin from Greek Mainas, Mainad-, from mainesthai 'to rave'. ma·es·to·so [MUSIC]   adv. & adj. (esp. as a direction) in a majestic manner.   n. (pl.-sos) a movement or passage marked to be performed in this way.  Italian, 'majestic', based on Latin majestas 'majesty'. maes·tro   n. (pl.maes·tri or maes·tros) a distinguished musician, esp. a conductor of classical music.  a great or distinguished figure in any sphere: a movie maestro.  early 18th cent.: Italian, 'master', from Latin magister.

I am a trained classical pianist. I can play all the masters. I can improvise on the piano, as well as play a variety of styles of music. Yet, I cannot build a piano. Is it necessary for me to know how to build a piano to be a good musician?

The rich, deep sounds of the pipe organ seem to vibrate through my whole body, as the notes tumble out from under skillful fingers.

classical musicians are now as subject to marketing principles as any other performers.

Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid boundaries versus fluid ones. Many Western cultures favor clean, tight boundaries whereas many Eastern cultures prefer more fluid, indiscriminate lines. In most Western homes, kitchen drawers are organized so that forks are with forks and knives are with knives. The walls of a room are usually uniform in color, and when a creative shift in color does occur, it usually happens at a corner or along a straight line midway down the wall. Pictures are framed with straight edges, molding covers up seams in the wall, and lawns are edged to form a clear line between the sidewalk and the lawn. Why? Because we view life in terms of classifications, categories, and taxonomies. And cleanliness itself is largely defined by the degree of order that exists. It has little to do with sanitation and far more to do with whether things appear to be in their proper place. Maintaining boundaries is essential in the Western world; otherwise categories begin to disintegrate and chaos sets in.13 Most Americans want dandelion-free lawns and roads with clear lanes prescribing where to drive and where not to drive. Men wear ties to cover the adjoining fabric on the shirts that they put on before going to the symphony, where they listen to classical music based on a scale with seven notes and five half steps. Each note has a fixed pitch, defined in terms of the lengths of the sound waves it produces.14 A good performance occurs when the musicians hit the notes precisely. In contrast, many Eastern cultures have little concern in everyday life for sharp boundaries and uniform categories. Different colors of paint may be used at various places on the same wall. And the paint may well “spill” over onto the window glass and ceiling. Meals are a fascinating array of ingredients where food is best enjoyed when mixed together on your plate. Roads and driving patterns are flexible. The lanes ebb and flow as needed depending on the volume of traffic. In a place like Cambodia or Nigeria, the road space is available for whichever direction a vehicle needs it most, whatever the time of day. And people often meander along the road in their vehicles the same way they walk along a path. There are many other ways aesthetics between one place and another could be contrasted. But the important point is some basic understanding of how cultures differ within the realm of aesthetics. Soak in the local art of a place and chalk it up to informing your strategy for international business.

Bach's simple and basic themes ultimately engage and appeal to my adolescent side while the seemingly complex arrangements, though perhaps patronizingly in some cases, also reflect my juvenile perception of what looks and sounds 'grown-up,' intelligent, refined and sophisticated. There were few composers and musicians in my youth that I could say understood me and really got me, almost all were classical. J. S. Bach was one one of them.

Just as the digital dominance of the recording studio seemed complete, analog had its revenge. Musicians, producers, and engineers searching for the sound of the music that inspired them—roots Americana, blues, and classic rock—began thinking about how the process of recording affected the sound. These artists, including White, Dave Grohl, and Gillian Welch, began experimenting with old tape machines and vintage studio equipment, returning to the analog methods they’d once used. Critics and fans noted that these albums sounded different—more heartfelt, raw, and organic—and the industry began to take notice.

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.

Saul grew up within a world of story and symbol: a single story, awaiting its divinely ordered fulfillment, and a set of symbols that brought that story into focus and enabled Jews to inhabit it. If we are going to understand him, to see who he really was, we have to grasp this and to realize that for him it wasn’t just a set of ideas. It was as basic to his whole existence as the great musical story from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms is to a classically trained musician today. Only more so.

11 — I have explained where Wagner belongs—not in the history of music. What does he signify nevertheless in that history? The emergence of the actor in music: a capital event that invites thought, perhaps also fear. In a formula: "Wagner and Liszt."— Never yet has the integrity of musicians, their "authenticity," been put to the test so dangerously. One can grasp it with one's very hands: great success, success with the masses no longer sides with those who are authentic,—one has to be an actor to achieve that!— Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner—they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilizations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavorable. The actor, alone, can still kindle great enthusiasm.— And thus it is his golden age which is now dawning—his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:—he "redeemed" them from monotony .... The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly to Riemann's [Hugo Riemann (1849-1919): music theoretician] services to rhythmic; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation—even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it "phrasing"). All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner's admirers—they have a perfect right to honor Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognize their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardor they feel themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner's influence has really been beneficial. Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact and obtain from themselves, they had never extracted before Wagner's time—before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there: the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce—the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more "dramatic" effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of décadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism, "self-denial." Neither taste, voices, nor gifts: Wagner's stage requires one thing only—Teutons! ... Definition of the Teuton: obedience and long legs ... It is full of profound significance that the arrival of Wagner coincides in time with the arrival of the "Reich": both actualities prove the very same thing: obedience and long legs.— Never has obedience been better, never has commanding. Wagnerian conductors in particular are worthy of an age that posterity will call one day, with awed respect, the classical age of war. Wagner understood how to command; in this, too, he was the great teacher. He commanded as the inexorable will to himself, as lifelong self-discipline: Wagner who furnishes perhaps the greatest example of self-violation in the history of art (—even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese). 12 The insight that our actors are more deserving of admiration than ever does not imply that they are any less dangerous ... But who could still doubt what I want,—what are the three demands for which my my love of art has compelled me?

Thanks to these imaginative arrangements and the interplay of seasoned, eclectic, open-minded, professional musicians who could step from a full-blown jazz session to a pop or folk context with practised ease, British folk-rock was aerated with a looseness that carried it beyond its one-man-and-a-guitar roots. ‘I think those kind of musicians at the time were the most flexible,’ commented Cameron many years later. ‘The early rock musicians were sometimes not as flexible as they should be. The classical musicians were totally inflexible, so you needed someone with a large amount of musicality but who could think on their feet. People like Danny Thompson, of course, came into their own. Danny was one of the first of those musicians who said, “I don’t want any boundaries, I’ll play what I damn well like,” and it was those kind of musicians who were great to use.

Unfolding according to the contemplative logic of their lyrical orbits, Astral Weeks’s songs unhooked themselves from pop’s dependence on verse/chorus structure, coasting on idling rhythms, raging and subsiding with the ebb and flow of Morrison’s soulful scat. The soundworld – a loose-limbed acoustic tapestry of guitar, double bass, flute, vibraphone and dampened percussion – was unmistakably attributable to the calibre of the musicians convened for the session: Richard Davis, whose formidable bass talents had shadowed Eric Dolphy on the mercurial Blue Note classic Out to Lunch; guitarist Jay Berliner had previous form with Charles Mingus; Connie Kay was drummer with The Modern Jazz Quartet; percussionist/vibesman Warren Smith’s sessionography included Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Nat King Cole, Sam Rivers and American folk mystics Pearls Before Swine. Morrison reputedly barely exchanged a word with the personnel, retreating to a sealed sound booth to record his parts and leaving it to their seasoned expertise to fill out the space. It is a music quite literally snatched out of the air.

But of course, this infolding of attention doesn’t need to be spatialized or visual. For an auditory example, I look to Deep Listening, the legacy of the musician and composer Pauline Oliveros. Classically trained in composition, Oliveros was teaching experimental music at UC San Diego in the 1970s. She began developing participatory group techniques—such as performances where people listened to and improvised responses to each other and the ambient sound environment—as a way of working with sound that could bring some inner peace amid the violence and unrest of the Vietnam War. Deep Listening was one of those techniques. Oliveros defines the practice as “listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.

Our hymnody needs attention, too. We need to sit down with our music ministers and go through each hymn each week, every song, everything that we sing as community and start to deconstruct them—examining each lyric with a fine-tooth comb. We need to demand that our hymnals stand with us in solidarity, and whenever whiteness is centered theologically, we need to demand that those words be changed. We can publish better work. It’s already being produced. We just need to gather a community of writers and musicians willing to share their gifts and work. We need to pay them for their work. The old classics can be revised and shifted to reflect a vision of the kingdom of God as it should be, not filtered through whiteness. To worship the creator through song is one of the great joys of gathering as church together. When we deconstruct and decolonize the symbols we use in worship, we can slowly but surely change the way that same God is imagined, experienced, and worshipped.

This country has no indigenous art that requires this level of skill. When classical music is transposed to our society we understand its purpose to be playing in a band or orchestra and we equate its complexity and sophistication to jazz. This is at best naive, at worst a perversion. A

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...

What I really enjoyed was that, although we (musicians) have all had similar journeys, you found a literary way of making yours so engaging and impossible to put down, making us able to relate to your experience and feel as if we were right there with you, What could have been mundane and boring in anyone else's hand becomes a timeless 'coming of age' narrative on a par with many classics....apart from all of the musical stuff, YOU ARE A TERRIFIC WRITER!" Guillermo Figueroa, violinist/conductor

The main character, a musician named Nicholas Brady, experiences being visited at night by a figure standing next to his bed and gazing down benevolently. “He had the impression that the figure, himself, had come back from the future, perhaps from a point vastly far ahead, to make certain that he, his prior self, was doing okay at a critical time in his life. The impression was distinct and strong and he could not rid himself of it.”4 In his classic 1954 book about a profound experience using mescaline, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley speculated that the brain served as a kind of filter or reducing valve for a more expanded, potentially omniscient consciousness he called Mind at Large.5 Increased understanding of the brain, altered states, and sleep states since that time has made it possible to push the kinds of questions Huxley asked about that reducing valve, and the special situations that may open or widen it, as well as the precognitive nature of some perceptual distortions and hallucinations, such as those that Dick chronicled and drew upon for his fiction. Expanding on Huxley’s insights, the writer Anthony Peake speculates that so-called REM intrusions in semi-awake states on the edge of sleep—as well as waking hallucinations experienced most commonly by people with neurological disorders and mental illness—reflect openings to our vaster consciousness, an inner guide he calls the Daemon.6 The Daemon, he notes, is often precognitive (among other things). What I am calling the Long Self is analogous to Peake’s Daemon, but I am placing greater emphasis on the biographical dimensions of this expanded sense of who we are. What precognitive dreams and dream-like phenomena suggest to me is the possibility that what Huxley called Mind at Large, and what mystics and shamans have often described as other realities and spirit worlds, may (at least partly) be our own transfigured lives, our biographies as they still lay untraversed and unlived ahead of us, including all the people and situations and emotions we have yet to encounter and experience. The reducing valve, in other words, might be a temporal thing, reducing our Long Self to something manageable by the mind in the moment, reflecting and refracting our entire biography through the present moment of conscious awareness. People who experience visitations by guardian protectors in dreams or waking visions may be unlikely to interpret these experiences as encounters with their future selves. It’s not an intuitive idea. They may interpret them instead in spiritual terms, as divine messengers. The Jungian tradition in psychotherapy, on the other hand, interprets them as split-off parts of the self. The Jungian analyst and writer Donald Kalsched describes an inner self-care system through which patients traumatized in childhood cordon off and protect a portion of the self from harm.7 That sequestered “regressed self”8 may reappear in dreams throughout life

One of the happiest couples I know are as different as could be: she a classical musician and lover of croissants, he an environmentalist rancher in the Santa Fe mountains. Their marriage vows included their own special clause – that he never had to go to an opera, and she never had to sleep on the ground!