Quotations for Musicians

•Use your talent, your good looks, and your education, to transform the whole world with the power of art. Engage the world through inspired teaching, through tireless proselytizing, through an unwavering practice of craft at its highest levels. Engage the world of fellow artists, teachers, audiences, students, critics and other various haters, with a boundless energy, an irrepressible zeal, an unassailable humility, and an infectious joie de vivre. Then you go from being the isolated, misunderstood, besieged artist to being a powerful testimony for the inevitable transcendence of artistry.  -Wynton Marsalis

•The arts, inspiring — indeed requiring — self-discipline, may be more “basic” to our national survival than traditional credit courses. Presently we are spending 29 times more on science than on the arts and the result so far is worldwide intellectual embarrassment. -Paul Harvey

•I always loved music; whoso has skill in this art is of good temperament, fitted for all things.  We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music; or I would not regard him. -Martin Luther

•When taking a shower, take a shower. When playing horn, play horn. -Zen Saying

•Mastery comes from practice; practice comes from playful, compulsive experimentation. – Stephen Nachmanovitch

•Sitting under a tree is good for your playing too. -Arnold Jacobs

•What is best in music is not to be found in the notes. –Gustav Mahler

•Fine horn playing is the result of a vast complex of physical motions and nerve reactions… [practice] is a process of eliminating those physical movements which do not produce the desired result, eventually reducing it to the one set of movements that does produce that result.   – Gunther Schuller

•We know that repetition by itself is not as effective as when there is contrast. The more ways we can find to practice a given passage the better off we are. –Gordon Terwilliger, Piano Teacher’s Professional Handbook

•Many students shy away from their difficulties because the quality of their playing in their more successful techniques encourages them. However, this solves no problems. The feeling of elation after having squarely faced a difficulty and having solved it is definitely more satisfying. – Philip Farkas, The Art of Horn Playing

•Our exposure to different types of music, and hence our musical literacy, has certainly expanded, but perhaps at a cost. As Daniel Levitin has pointed out, passive listening has largely replaced active music-making. Now that we can listen to anything we like on our iPods, we have less motivation to go to concerts or churches or synagogues, less occasion to sing together. This is unfortunate, because music-making engages much more of our brains than simply listening. Partly for this reason, to celebrate my 75th birthday last year, I started taking piano lessons (after a gap of more than sixty years). I still have my iPod (it contains the complete works of Bach), but I also need to make music every day. – neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia

•Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. –Italian proverb

•Interamerican Development Bank president Felipe Herrara, a Chilean economist, told of a tiny Indian village on the high altiplano near Bolivia’s Lake  Titicaca, where he’d gone on a feasibility study for a proposed hydroelectric dam. Upon completing the site visit, his team realized they hadn’t used their entire travel budget. Since the village lacked everything, they assembled the local chiefs and explained that they had some money left. In gratitude for hospitality and assistance, they’d like to give it to the community as a gift.

“What project would you like us to fund here in the name of the Bank?”

The Indian elders excused themselves and went off to discuss this offer. In just five minutes they returned. “We know what we want to do with the money.”

“Excellent. Whatever you want.”

“We need new musical instruments for our band.”

“Maybe,” replied the Bank team spokesman, “you didn’t understand. What you need are improvements like electricity. Running water. Sewers. Telephone and telegraph.”

But the Indians had understood perfectly.

“In our village,” the eldest explained, “everyone plays a musical instrument. On Sundays after mass, we all gather for la retreta, a concert on the church patio. First we make music together. After that, we can talk about problems in our community and how to resolve them. But our instruments are old and falling apart. Without music, so will we.”