Violinists

"If my works are good and of any importance for the further development of our art, they will maintain their position in spite of all opposition on the part of critics, and in spite of all denigration of my artistic intentions. If they are worthtless, not even the most gratifying box office success or the most enthusiastic acclamation of augurs will keep them alive. Let the pulping press devour them...I shall not shed a tear over their grave."

"I am convinced that the decisive factor in dramatic effect will be a smaller orchestra, which does not drown out the human voice as does a large orchestra…The orchestra of the opera of the future is the chamber orchestra which, by painting in the background of the action on the stage with crystalline clearness, can alone realise precisely the intention of the composer with regard to the vocal parts. It is after all an important desideratum that the audience should not only hear the sounds but should also be able to follow the words closely."

"Producers of opera nowadays usually make the mistake of translating each particular orchestral phrase into terms of a movement on the stage. In this matter one should proceed with a maximum of caution and good taste. There is no objection to bringing life to into the production by changes of position and new nuances of acting during repetitive passages of music, especially in arias. Preludes of one or two bars frequently, and especially in Mozart, clearly express some gesture on stage. But each trill on the flute does not represent a wink on the prima donna, nor every delayed chord on the strings a step or gesture. Whole passages, especially in the finales, are pure concert music and are best left undisturbed by “play acting”."

"Conducting is, after all, a difficult business – one has to be seventy years of age to realise this fully!"

"The left hand has nothing to do with conducting. Its proper place is the waistcoat pocket from which it should only emerge to restrain or make some minor gesture for which in any case a scarcely perceptible glance should suffice."

"It is better to conduct with the ear instead of with the arm: the rest follows automatically."

"Ten Golden Rules (for the album of a young conductor)"

":1. Remember you are making music not to amuse yourself but to delight the audience."

":2. You should not perspire when conducting: only the audience should get warm."

":3. Conduct 'Salome' and 'Elektra' as if they were by Mendelssohn: fairy music."

":4. Never look encouragingly at the brass, except with a short glance to give an important cue."

":5. But never let the horns and woodwind out of your sight: if you can hear them at all they are still too strong."

":6. If you think that the brass is not blowing hard enough, tone it down another shade or two."

":7. It is not enough that you yourself can hear every word the soloist sings - you know it off by heart anyway: the audience must be able to follow without effort. If they do not understand the words they will go to sleep."

":8. Always accompany a singer in such a way that he can sing without effort."

":9. When you think you have reached the limits of prestissimo, go twice as fast. (1948 Today, I should like to ammend this as follows: Go twice as slowly - addressed to conductors of Mozart)."

":10. If you follow these rules carefully you will, with your fine gifts and great accomplishments, always be the darling of your listeners."

"When during my stay in Egypt I became familiar with the works of Nietzsche, whose polemic against christianity was particularly to my liking, the antipathy which I had always felt against a religion which relieves the faithful of responsibility for their actions (by means of confession) was confirmed and strengthened."

"Melody as revealed in the greatest works of our classics is one of the most noble gifts which an invisible deity has bestowed on mankind."

"Mozart's melodies, Beethoven's symphonies, Schubert's songs, acts two and three of Tristan are symbols in which are revealed the most profound spiritual truths. They are not "invented", but are "given in their dreams"to those privileged to receive them. Whence they come no one knows, not even their creator, the unconscious mouthpiece of the demiurge."

"The melodic idea which suddenly falls upon me out of the blue appears in the imagination immediately, unconsciously, uninfluenced by reason. It is the greatest gift of the divinity and cannot be compared with anything else."

"Of all god-gifted dispensers of joy, Johann Strauss is to me the most endearing. I willingly admit to having sometimes conducted the Perpetuum Mobile with far more pleasure than many a four movement symphony."

"As for the Rosenkavalier waltzes...how could I have done those without a thought of the laughing genius of Vienna?"

"In my opinion, Gustav Mahler's work is one of the most important and interesting products in the history of modern creative arts."

"I know what I want, and I know what I meant when I wrote this. After all, I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer."

"My wife, my child, my music, Nature and the sun; they are my happiness."

"Anybody who wants to be a real musician must be able to set a menu to music."

"I am not one to compose long melodies as did Mozart. I can’t get beyond short themes. But what I can do, is utilize such a theme, paraphrase it and extract everything that is in it, and I don’t think there’s anybody today who can match me in that."

"Why don't people see what is new in my work, how in them, as is found only in Beethoven, the human being visibly plays a part in the work."

"Thirty years ago I was regarded as a rebel, but to-day, as you see, I have lived to find myself a classic."

"I hope, most revered Maestro, that these metronome markings, in my opinion wholly unneeded by you, are specific enough. Where they do not fit with your conception, I implore you urgently just to ignore them."

"It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity"

"Very fine, but why do you put so many wrong notes in? Basically, it is all built on simple triads."

"More like a sacrilege du printemps."

"Declarations about war and politics are not fitting for an artist, who must give his attention to his creations and his works."

"Man (in B major) asks: When? When? Nature, (in C Major) answers from the depths Never, never, never will the weather improve"."

"Long live the politico-satrical-parodistic opera!"

"It is difficult composing endings. Beethoven and Wagner could do it. Only great composers can do it. I can do it too."

"Strauss told me about his new ballet, which he wrote in the summer. It’s called ‘Schlagobers’ (whipped cream) and he said, jokingly: ‘Oh yes, when one gets old one has ideas like that.’"

"Please start from the Bruch violin concerto again!"

"I ask myself why I have actually survived once more and been called back to life."

"I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!"

"I believe that he (Strauss) will remain one of the characteristic and outstanding figures in musical history. Works like Salome, Elektra and Intermezzo, and others will not perish."

"I would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today."

"I watched him at rehearsals and admired the way he conducted. Every corrective remark he made was exact: his ears and his musicianship were impregnable."

"Richard Strauss? An old Oyster!"

"Richard Strauss is a brilliant pig - I can find no other word for it. The whole thing is larded with illogical, unnecessary and hideous discord."

"No other composer equals Strauss in his power of writing long stretches of music that interests us in and for itself, at the same time that every line and colour in it seems to express some new trait of the individual who is being sketched."

"Salome again made an extraordinary impression on me. It is entirely a work of genius, very powerful and decidedly one of the most important things that our age has produced."

"I labour on with countless rehearsals. He makes do with just a few, and it always sounds right."

"I simply must tell you of the thrilling impression the work (Salome) made on me when I read through it recently. Every note is spot on! Your vocation is to be dramatist. Through your music you have made me understand for the first time what Wilde's work is about"

"You are really the only one of all my colleagues who takes any notice of my works."

"Richard Strauss is at the same time a poet and a musician."

"While conducting an orchestra he breaks into a frantic dance which follows the slightest details of his quivering music like clear water into which a stone has just fallen."

"He conducts with his whole body - arms, head and behind together. At moments he seems to dance on his knees; he crouches down; he makes tense and pulsating movements, like electric vibrations, with his hands. He gives explanations in very bad French, and sings out of tune passages that he wants played again; he cares nothing for ridicule; he always looks bored, sulky half asleep - but nevertheless lets nothing escape him."

"His music stirs me to my very depths. To me the finale is a flood of strength and joy. One always wonders how that could have come out of this. There has been nothing like it in symphonic music since Beethoven."

"When all is said and done, he was a giant - even if his feet were made of clay."

"He is one of those musicians about whom it is difficult to write impartially or objectively, as his music is likely to arouse antipathy or admiration according to the temperamental outlook of the individual critic."

"I can assure you, that the sun shines in Richard Strauss's music. It is impossible to resist the overwhelming power of this man!"

"He definiteley thinks in colored images. Ein Heldenleben is a book of images, cinematography even."

"Richard Strauss has neither a foolish wild curly mane, nor the movements of a madman. He is tall and in his free, resolute attitude he looks like one of those great explorers who, with a smile on their faces, cross the territory of savage peoples. Doesn't one need something of this attitude in order to be able to shake the well-mannered public?"

"Except for Strauss, there are none but second class composers in Germany."

"Salome and Pelléas et Mélisande are the most striking works in European music for the last fifteen years."

"I was aroused as by a flash of lightning by the first Budapest performance of Also Sprach Zarathustra. It contained the seeds for a new life. I started composing again."

"He asked about Vienna and the Opera, listened with great interest, grumbled about the Italian dress rehearsals. He thought opera in German-speaking countries should be performed in German."

"Even if he has many hard sides to him and often appears cold, in the seven weeks of our tour I have come to recognise him as one of the noblest of men. Every hour spent with him is gain, even when he is silent."

"Strauss played some from memory. He’s not a good by-heart player, and something extraordinary happened with ‘All mein Gedanken’. Already after the third bar he couldn’t remember the accompaniment anymore and composed an entirely new song. I leapt along with him, the words fitted perfectly, no one in the audience suspected a thing, and when we had made it to the end I turned my eyes to the right to see what his reaction was. All I saw was him grinning from ear to ear—it was really difficult for me to find the calm and seriousness needed for the next song, ‘Freundliche Vision’. After the group we couldn’t stop laughing in the artists’ room, and I asked him to write down the new ‘All mein Gedanken’ straightaway afterwards, but he replied ‘Oh, I’ve already completely forgotten it.’ What a pity! I liked it much more than the original."

"I want to pick the old man's brains for my opera."

"The Symphonia Domestica was amusing and annoying by turns; but with some lovely bits."

"Strauss, the new conductor, seemed a hopeless failure; he kept the band as smooth, and also inane, as a linen collar; and his tempi, except for the occasional gallop in the wrong place, were for the most part insufferably slow. We all sat wishing we had not come, and that Strauss had never been born."

"I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all."

"When it comes to the music of Richard Strauss, the bowing makes the fiddler grouse."

"Work, as he practised it, was quite a remarkable procedure with Strauss. Nothing of the daemonic, nothing of the artist’s mad exaltation, nothing of those depressions and desperations we know from accounts of Beethoven and Wagner. Strauss works to the point and composes like Johann Sebastian Bach, like all those sublime craftsmen of their art, quietly and systematically. At nine in the morning he sits down to resume his work just where he left off the day before, always writing the first sketch of his composition in pencil, the piano score in ink, and continues thus without pause until twelve or one o’clock. In the afternoon he plays Skat, a German card game, transfers two or three pages to the final score and possibly conducts an opera in the evening. He does not know what nervousness is, by day and night his artistic mind is equally alert and lucid. When his valet knocks on the door to bring his evening clothes, he gets up from his work, dresses, rides to the theatre and conducts with the same assurance and calm with which he plays Skat in the afternoon, and the next morning inspiration again falls into its proper place."

"I have met a great many artists in my life but never one who knew how to maintain such abstract and unerring objectivity towards himself. Thus Strauss frankly admitted to me in the first hour of our meeting that he well knew, that at seventy the composer’s musical inspiration no longer possesses its pristine power. He could hardly succeed in composing works like Till Eulenspiegel or Death and Transfiguration because just pure music requires an extreme measure of creative freshness. But the World could still inspire him!"

"German Music is unthinkable without Richard Strauss."

"Wagner's music is the most modern and the ultimate. Nobody is beyond that. Strauss's "Progress" is drivel."

"I can assure you sincerely: since Wagner we have not had such a great master as Strauss."

"The greatest impression he made on me: whatever he said or did, happened – with greatest ease. One never had the impression of being in front of a person who was aware of his own significance or who acted upon it. There was never any trace of vanity, as with many when faced with the fate of considering oneself above average."

"Here is another small indication of how Strauss saw himself primarily as a practising musician rather than as a big composer of his time – which he was. In the years leading up to the Second World War, when it was still not the fashion for famous people to give out their private telephone numbers, I would read for the first time in a Garmisch Telephone Book: Dr. Strauss, Richard, Kapellmeister, and not as one would suspect “Composer”."

"He would write out the full score from the short score with everything, even new counterpoints in ink in the final draft;...he never crossed anything out. If he made a mistake he would take out a pen-knife, carefully erase it, smooth the spot with his nail and write the note over the spot. But there were very few corrections to be done, for he rarely made a mistake. Even with transposing instruments, where it is easy to go wrong. He would write just as the likes of us write a letter."

"Once, he was sitting at his desk, with me behind him. He was working on the score of Daphne and discussing a Mozart interpretation with me. Upon which I said "But Herr Doktor, you can't talk to me about other things whilst you are working". He replied: "Don't worry, carry on my dear Böhm, I am able to think of the two things at once"."

"There was no more hard-working musician in Germany. Mahler was one of many to marvel at his energy, expressing open astonishment at Strauss's ability to produce such a wide-ranging body of music while, simultaneously, sustaining an opera house, an orchestra, conducting guest tours and a family."

"“What do I think of Jazz? Jazz is royal concert in the palace of King Attila! The original negro melodies from which it is derived are sublime, but Jazz —" said Dr.Strauss shrugging his shoulders."

"Se questa non piace, non voglio più scrivere di musica."

"Italians have such illustrious people they can celebrate, that everyone celebrates — Michelangelo, Vivaldi and, of course, for us on the left, Sacco and Vanzetti."

"Overrated: Vivaldi. He has recently become Mr. Baroque, and that is not fair to Bach and Handel. His music does not have the substance, the innovative quality or the passion of the greatest composers. Of course, it's perfectly good music and it makes the listener feel good, but there is no door opening as there is with the great masters."

"Christopher Hogwood: "Caricaturists of all countries I have a great interest in; I like to observe what happens to an artist's vision when there is a deliberate distortion for the viewer. This is found in Italian art and in much Italian music. Vivaldi sometimes uses caricature in a very serious and grim sense, not at all comic.""

"Robert Craft: “Are you interested in the current revival of eighteenth-century Italian masters?” Igor Stravinsky: “Not very. Vivaldi is greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.”"

"Overrated: Antonio Vivaldi. I'm tired of him. Stravinsky once said that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. I disagree. Instead, I think he began 500 concertos and never achieved anything in them. So he kept trying over and over again without ever quite succeeding."

"With Antonio Vivaldi, Italian Baroque music reached its zenith. The prosperous, cultivated world of contemporary Venice shines through all his works, composed with innate craftsmanship."

"If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances."

"Music is for me like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces."

"If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music."

"Whereas most other modern composers are engaged in manufacturing cocktails of every hue and description, I offer the public cold spring water."

"Never pay any attention to what critics say…Remember, a statue has never been set up in honour of a critic!"

"It is so difficult to mix with artists! You must choose business men to talk to, because artists only talk of money."

"The framework of a symphony must be so strong that it forces you to follow it, regardless of the environment and circumstances."

"I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful."

"Art is the signature of civilizations."

"In his work a means of escape has been found from outmoded romanticism on the one hand and from a barren objectivity on the other."

"Sibelius is unquestionably a leader in the front rank of symphonic composers. He has got out of the ruts worn by his predecessors far more completely than Brahms got away from Beethoven, or even Richard Strauss from Wagner. If someone would only burn Finlandia he would come to our young people as an entirely original inventor of a new art form and a new harmony technique."

"Sibelius has an acutely developed sense of identification with nature and a preoccupation with myth that at one and the same time define his unique strength and his basic limitation. These preoccupations override his involvement in the human predicament, except in so far as it affects man’s relationship with nature."

"My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require."

"To my friends pictured within."

"The enigma I will not explain – its "dark saying" must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the variations and the theme is often of the slightest texture."

"I always said God was against art and I still believe it. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward – I ask for no reward – only to live & to hear my work."

"People who talk of the spread of music in England and the increasing love of it, rarely seem to know where the growth of the art is really strong and properly fostered: some day the press will awake to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North."

"Play it like something you hear down by the river."

"His range is so Handelian that he can give the people a universal melody or march with as sure a hand as he can give the Philharmonic Society a symphonic adagio, such as has not been given since Beethoven died."

"The aggressive Edwardian prosperity that lends so comfortable a background to Elgar's finales is now as strange to us as the England that produced Greensleeves and The Woodes so wilde. Stranger, in fact, and less sympathetic. In consequence much of Elgar's music, through no fault of its own, has for the present generation an almost intolerable air of smugness, self-assurance and autocratic benevolence."

"Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination."

"Dem höchsten Gott allein zu Ehren, Dem Nächsten draus sich zu belehren."

"Und soll wie aller Musik also auch des Generalbasses Finis und Endursache anders nicht als nur zu Gottes Ehre und Recreation des Gemütes sein. Wo dieses nicht in acht genommen wird, ists keine eigentliche Musik, sondern ein Teuflisches Geplerr und Geleier."

"Not brook, but ocean should be his name (Bach is the German word for brook.)"

"Bach is the immortal God of Harmony."

"To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation."

"To be able to hear J. S. Bach take a melody and improvise what amounts to a spontaneous composition is the most amazing thing I can think of."

"My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand mathematics and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common."

"One of the most extraordinary things about history's most extraordinary musician is the fact that this man's music, which exerts such a magnetic attraction for us today, against which we tend to measure much of the achievement in the art of music in the last two centuries, that this music had absolutely no effect on either the musicians or the public of his own day. And the strange thing about Bach is that he doesn't at all fit our conception of the misunderstood genius who was years ahead of his time. He was certainly misunderstood, but not because he was ahead of his time, rather because according the musical disposition of that day, he was generations behind it."

"For Bach, it wasn't finality that mattered in music, it was simply the joyous essence of being."

"The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile."

"I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that – its humanity."

"Bach is, for me, the touchstone that keeps my playing honest. Keeping the intonation pure in double stops, bringing out the various voices where the phrasing requires it, crossing the strings so that there are not inadvertent accents, presenting the structure in such a way that it's clear to the listener without being pedantic - one can't fake things in Bach, and if one gets all of them to work, the music sings in the most wonderful way."

"Pongileoni's bowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking onto it vibrating: and thus in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward's membrane tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus, and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edwards ecstatically whispered "Bach!""

"I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course."

"All roads lead to Bach."

"Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all."

"JS Bach has been called 'the supreme arbiter and law-giver of music'. He is to music what Leonardo da Vinci is to art and Shakespeare is to literature, one of the supreme creative geniuses of history."

"Music is life and, like it, inextinguishable."

"In fact the hardest part is trying to forget music when I'm not conducting it."

"I don't want to be conducting Mahler with my head stuffed full of 10 million notes from other composers."

"I come to a performance of music that I know very well as if I were performing it for the first time. Every day is a new day, a new experience. This is the way I approach a masterpiece. A masterpiece can never age - it's only the people who perform it or listen to it who become insensitive to it. If you come with a fresh feeling toward a masterpiece, it will always feel fresh and give you the benefit of its genius."

"Nothing is more difficult than talking about music: if it is a prickly business for musicians, it is almost impossible for anyone else—the strongest, subtlest minds go astray."

"It’s not too difficult to find a string player who really sings on his instrument, but it’s very rare to find a string player who speaks on his instrument."

"Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es."

"La découverte d'un mets nouveau fait plus pour le bonheur du genre humain que la découverte d'une étoile."

"The main thing is not to lose your identity and to continue working ... You have a quartet. That is such joy! You can forget everything else in the world. I'm playing a lot of chamber music these days. Tomorrow we were going to give the first performance of two trios, but because of the mourning, all concerts have been canceled."

"I was three and a half years old when my father brought home a toy fiddle," playing "with which I am very happy fancies himself a street musician... I thought not and could not be happier than go from house to house with a violin "."

"When I think of myself in those years, it seems to me that I was playing quite freely and fluently, tonally pure. But there is still have many years of hard work over the sound, rhythm and dynamics. Of course, most importantly, a deep comprehension of the inner content."

"Oistrakh's playing was not so much marked by brilliance, but by richness, lyricism, roundness of tone; the unbelievable sharp and clear contact between string and bow, his ability to lengthen the bow stroke on even the shortest notes without the slightest tension, his beautifully fleshy, supple left hand capable of producing glorious vibrato together with an infinite variety of shades."

"Trying to be better than someone else is a pure waste of time. Strive to be better than you were yesterday."

"When I was back there listening to Eric play and I thought, 'Gosh, I hate it when the warm up guy is better than I am.' He was great."

"Out of the conquered Past Unravishable Beauty; Hearts that are dew and dust Rebuking the dream of Death; Flower of the clay down-cast Triumphant in earth’s aroma; Strings that were strained in rust A-tremble with Music’s breath!Wine that was spilt in haste Arising in fumes more precious; Garlands that fell forgot Rooting to wondrous bloom; Youth that would flow to waste Pausing in pool-green valleys— And Passion that lasted not Surviving the voiceless Tomb!"

"I have seen the God Pan and it was in this manner: I heard a bewildering and pervasive music moving from precision to precision within itself. Then I heard a different music, hollow and laughing. Then I looked up and saw two eyes like the eyes of a wood-creature peering at me over a brown tube of wood. Then someone said: Yes, once I was playing a fiddle in the forest and I walked into a wasp's nest. ... When a man is able, by a pattern of notes or by an arrangement of planes or colours, to throw us back into the age of truth, a certain few of us – no, I am wrong, everyone who has been cast back into the age of truth for one instant – gives honour to the spell which has worked, to the witch-work or the art-work, or whatever you like to call it. Therefore I say, and stick to it, I saw and heard the God Pan; shortly afterwards I saw and heard Mr. Dolmetsch."

"It was Dolmetsch, the Belgian sic] musician, who first taught me what a great musician Sullivan really was; till then I knew nothing of him except as a writer of the comic operas; but Dolmetsch taught me the splendor of 'The Golden Legend' and the beauty of some of his songs, such as 'Oh Mistress Mine' and 'Orpheus with His Lute'. Dolmetsch explained many musical problems to me. Of course, everyone knows that he was the first to make the harpsichord and clavichord as in the earlier days, but to hear him play Bach on the instrument that Bach had written his music for was an unforgettable experience: it was like hearing a great sonnet of Shakespeare perfectly recited for the first time."

"Has he tempered the viol’s wood To enforce both the grave and the acute? Has he curved us the bowl of the lute? Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest Dolmetsch ever be thy guest."

"It takes a special kind of musician to stand onstage with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Bonham and hold their own. John Paul Jones is that musician twice over, primarily on bass but also on keys. Jonesy’s Jazz Bass is an integral part of the Led Zeppelin sound, with its thunderous harmonic overtones providing a solid bed for Page to go ham all over while also not getting lost underneath the almighty power of Bonham’s gloriously animalistic drumming style."

"Perhaps the most interesting and undoubtedly impressive aspect of Jones' run is the fact he's essentially had two careers. The first came with Led Zeppelin, where he was arguably the most unheralded member of the legendary rock outfit . When Led Zeppelin disbanded following drummer John Bonham's death, Jones ensured he kept his bass plugged in. Jones, whose professional career began as a technically sound session player capable of playing anything from blues to hard rock, had no trouble making a living while working with the likes of R.E.M, Foo Fighters, and Peter Gabriel in his post-Zeppelin world."

"Arcangelo Corelli was the main founder of modern orchestral playing and the composer who fashioned two new musical forms, the Baroque trio and solo sonata, and the concerto grosso."

"Israel’s actions are fundamentally at odds with the values that Eurovision claims to uphold — peace, unity, and respect for human rights."

"As a composer, he enriched violin music by his numerous concertos and sonatas, and by a few dainty songs. However, it is as a virtuoso and as the founder of modern violin playing that Viotti will be remembered."