8 quotes found
"The folksong collectors Bartok (Hungary) and Plicka (Czechoslovakia) notated the perceived interval deviations with a plus or minus sign (+,-). Older folksong collectors had notated all the intervals in the system of semitones, not observing the finer modifications of intervals. This first gained currency from the phongraph and tape recordings of folk music from various lands....From folksong I learned to perceive melodic intervals a little smaller or greater than those of the semitone-system....In my youth it often happened that the folk singers, who during the intermissions of dance festivals sang songs of "their kind," deviating from the semitone system, demanded that the first violinist of the Wisowitzer Kapelle play "their" melody just as they sang it. Once a tempermental singer threatened to strike the double-bass player with a beer mug if he didn't "play along" with the song, exactly as he sang it."
"I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States."
"In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or any purpose. There is nothing in the whole age of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source."
"It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression – at least, not in the beginning – and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap."
"The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds. Thousands pass it, while others trample it under foot, and thus the chances are that it will perish before it is seen by the one discriminating spirit who will prize it above all else. The fact that no one has as yet arisen to make the most of it does not prove that nothing is there."
"The Americans expect great things of me... If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense."
"After years of trial and error Franz Kafka] has at last found the only diet that suits him, the vegetarian one. For years he suffered from his stomach; now he is as healthy and as fit as I have ever known him. Then along come his parents, of course, and in the name of love try to force him back into eating meat and being ill—it is just the same with his sleeping habits. At last he has found what suits him best, he can sleep, can do his duty in that senseless office, and get on with his literary work. But then his parents... This really makes me bitter."
"Once he Kafka] went to the Berlin aquarium … Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks, "Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you any more." It was the time that he turned strict vegetarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality—which was something almost completely foreign to him—he brought them out. Among my notes I find something else that Kafka said about vegetarianism. He compared vegetarians with the early Christians, persecuted everywhere, everywhere laughed at, and frequenting dirty haunts. "What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.""