Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas... For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse. Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less... socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anestheti...c: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhym...e, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one ...when it is woven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pregnant woman and her spouse dream of three babies--the perfect four-month-old who rewards them with smiles and musical cooing,... the impaired baby, who changes each day, and the mysterious real baby whose presence is beginning to be evident in the motions of the fetus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »