Sonatas Quotes

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  • What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip.

    Night   Symphony   Years  
    Henry Miller (1945). “The Air-conditioned Nightmare”, [New York] : New directions
  • Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshiped by man.

  • Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the "Mona Lisa" painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

    God   Spring   Creativity  
    1957 Baccalaureate address, 9 Jun.
  • As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven's last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

    "Every Good Boy Does Fine" by Jeremy Denk, www.newyorker.com. April 8, 2013.
  • There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

    Sky   Moonlight   Thunder  
    "Dancing of Sounds". Poem by Dejan Stojanovic,
  • The Unicorn Sonata... tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes - and our ears - to find it.

    Home   Eye   Ears  
    "The Unicorn Sonata". Book by Peter S. Beagle, 1996.
  • Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?.

    David Ogilvy (1963). “Confessions of an advertising man”, Holiday House
  • There are patterns which emerge in one's life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation on a theme. So musicians say the greatest sonatas are composed; whether or not it is true, I do not know, but of a surety I have seen it emerge in the tapestry of my life.

    Jacqueline Carey (2003). “Kushiel's Chosen: A Novel”, p.49, Macmillan
  • I really love how the andante from the "A minor Sonata" sounds on the mandolin.

    Sound   Sonatas   Minors  
    "Chris Thile Looks Back To Bach". "Weekend Edition" with Rachel Martin, www-s4.npr.org. August 11, 2013.
  • My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun... they are the sun's kisses.

    Kissing   Sun   Born  
  • Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. ~The Kreutzer Sonata

    Laughter   Real   Sleep  
    Leo Tolstoy (2016). “LEO TOLSTOY – The Ultimate Short Stories Collection: 120+ Titles in One Volume (World Classics Series): The Kreutzer Sonata, The Forged Coupon, Hadji Murad, Alyosha the Pot, Master and Man, Father Sergius, Diary of a Lunatic, The Cossacks, My Dream, The Young Tsar, Fables and Stories for Children...”, p.135, e-artnow
  • Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

    Music   Years   Piano  
  • Composing a concert is like composing a menu.... If you start with light pieces and play a 45-minute sonata after the interlude, it's like starting dinner with hors d'oeuvres and dessert and finishing with a Châteaubriand and vegetables.

    Light   Vegetables   Play  
  • I want nothing better, more flexible or more complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purposes.

    Purpose   Want   Form  
  • Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.

  • For me, even my break time I like to pull out the bow and just go over a Vivaldi sonata and keep my head sharp, keep everything sharp.

    Vivaldi   Bows   Break  
  • The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.

    Heart   Views   Sunrise  
    Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.10, W. W. Norton & Company
  • The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists.

    Quoted in Nat Shapiro, An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music (1978)
  • Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

    Wall   Book   Symphony  
    Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.
  • The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

    Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage
  • Life is a refining process. Our response to it determines whether we'll be ground down or polished up. On a piano, one person sits down and plays sonatas, while another merely bangs away at "Chopsticks." The piano is not responsible. It's how you touch the keys that makes the difference. It's how you play what life gives you that determines your joy and shine.

    Attitude   Keys   Play  
    Barbara Johnson (2000). “Boomerang Joy: Joy That Goes Around, Comes Around”, p.79, Zondervan
  • No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?

    Music   Two   Piano  
  • Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

  • The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

    Dream   Children   Blood  
    Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of Love: Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses”, p.151, Vintage
  • I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. A bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert.. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas.

    Mean   Thinking   Smell  
  • All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

    Beauty   Long   Phrases  
    Samuel Beckett (2007). “Molloy”, p.32, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

    War   Writing   Character  
    H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.173, Vintage
  • Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.

    Inspiration   Light   Dna  
  • Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.

    Source: www.wbur.org
  • Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there.

    War   Nice   Lunch  
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