If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddli...ng yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light.... Few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known--it was used pri...marily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is "the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy's pony."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact... that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If music and sweet poetry agree, As they must needs (the sister and the brother),... Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me, Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which ba...nishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts; a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation, bei...ng absolutely necessary to excel in either; which, in my opinion, is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art, and now in Italy placed even above the other two--a proof of the decline of that country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »