heaven and earth, nature and man, comedy and tragedy, … the Virgin Mary and the demons...Mozart simply contains and includes all this within his music in perfect harmony. This harmony is not a matter of “balance” or “indifference” – it is a glorious upsetting of the balance, a turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, in which the Yes rings louder than the ever-present
I could see us sitting at the old piano, while he tried to explain how music worked. I could see the Iron glamour in the notes, the strict lines and rigid rules that made up the score, but the music itself was a vortex of song and pure, swirling emotion. They weren’t separate entities, creative magic and Iron glamour. They were one; cold logic and wild emotion, merged together to create something truly beautiful.
It is possible for music to be labeled "Christian" and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled cliches. That "Christian" band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren't a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a "Christian" movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft.
We shared a piece of Poncho's apple pie, and I told Poncho about PureTone. Like all serious musicians, he is depressed by the quality of sound the people's music id delivered in today. That is the impression I have gotten from every Musician I have met. Everyone. After he heard PureTone, Ben Bourdon, one of Ben Young's caregivers asked me if I was making war on Apple. I said, "No. I'm waging heavy peace.
It's always been the love of the music for me, the rawness of the notes vibrating through my body, the honesty of the sound I create that blocks out all the other shit. If you don't let all that, the music, its impact, become a part of you, then it doesn't matter how good you are, how successful. I don't care who you are, if you don't surrender to the power of the music, you are just playing a role.
... and I realise the only way to tell the others is through the way my voice can take these broken wordsand turn it into music. Turn it into poetry.And I sing to make myself come alive, but also for you,because I’d like this to mean something.To not disappear with the dark I will enter one day and so now I will tell.If not for you, then for my own heart, because it tells me to,and I'm learning to listen.
It don't matter about all that anyway," Armstrong added. "You think it do, but it don't. A man ain't just his one talent. Lil Louis needs you. And Jones look to you like you his brother. You got the talent of making others your kin, your blood. Music, well that's different. I reckon it got its own worth, but it ain't a man's whole life.""Aww hell, Louis," I thought. "Ain't nothing else I want.
I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.
Scattered among these things are reminders that sound once existed: a metronome, a drumming pad, a guitar pick, a trumpet mouthpiece, a music stand, a tuning fork, a block of rosin...The older instruments bear the marks of those who have already played them, the scuffs and bites and dents that are the mysterious scars of sound. In their midst the house hangs, tenuous and enveloping, a sounding board waiting to be struck.
On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing, Paul was cute, and George, with velvet brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I'd ever seen. At the break for lunch I found myself sitting next to him, whether by accident or design I have never been sure. We were both shy and spoke hardly a word to each other, but being close to him was electrifying.
Never gonna stop 'til the clock stops tickin'Never gonna quit 'til my legs stop kickin'I will follow you and we'll both go missin' No I'm never givin' up 'til my heart stops beatin'Never lettin' go 'til my lungs stop breathingI will follow you and we'll both go missin' No, I and we don't even know where we're goingBut I'm sitting with you and I'm glowing
The “music of decline” had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.
The beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts—a ship, with its strings like rigging, its case a hull, its lifted lid a sail. Kestrel always thought that the piano didn't sound like a single instrument but a twinned one, with its low and high halves merging together or pulling apart.
I am adrift. At 21, penniless in a world of plausible excuses, I am alone with my goals. These are difficult years, and if anything loving lay ahead I was already paying a large enough price. At my lowest in these years of signing on, I do not fit in anywhere with the family philosophy, and these days set the tempo of the times- even for the days when the sun re-enters the room. Travestied or not, you must just get through it.
It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth.
