People From New York City

"We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species."

"If getting used to music is the essential condition for understanding, it is hard to see just what purpose is served by writing about it. A few experiences of listening to a symphony or nocturne are worth more than any essay or analysis. The work of art itself teaches us how to understand it, and makes the critic not merely parasitical but strictly superfluous."

"Critical evaluation was transformed into understanding, and criticism became not an act of judgment but of comprehension."

"It is fitting that a discourse on Romantic music should commence with a meditation on the art of Bach. The Bach revival is still sometimes considered an early nineteenth-century phenomenon, although this is hardly tenable: in the 1780s Mozart was deeply affected by Bach, and at the same time Beethoven was being brought up on the Well-Tempered Keyboard. Bach was well known to European musicians as a composer of keyboard music through manuscript copies of this work long before systematic publication began in 1800. The "revival" of Bach in the Romantic period was basically a rediscovery of his choral works and a new evaluation of his technique: his art was no longer simply a model for the fugue, as it had been in the eyes of Mozart, but for the art of music as a whole. The new approach to Bach and to Baroque music in general, however, did not extend to the sound of that music on the original instruments. Few musicians in the 1820s and '30s 'had the slightest interest in the sonority of old harpsichords or Baroque organs (Ignaz Moscheles was an engaging exception). What they saw, and needed to see, in Bach was the achievement of an ideal."

"Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seem to be beside the point—even when the attribution is authoritative, even when it is made by the composer himself."

"Normally, misprints are either easily corrected or else so trivial that it makes no difference whether we play the correct or the faulty version. ... Nevertheless, on rare occasions, a misprint or slip of the pen may challenge our view of the musical language. These extreme cases may help us understand a little more about the way music acquires meaning, or what it means to say that the music makes sense."

"Our sensuous appreciation of the world and of the works created by man has, no doubt, a biological foundation, one shared by all human beings, but that is no use to us when we try to evaluate a Bach fugue or a Dostoevsky novel-or even the simple experience of a landscape, as our delight in the view of a mountain or a waterfall is also determined by the traditions of our culture. The coexistence of different criteria of judgment is, in any case, by now a fact of life. Beethoven cannot be judged or even understood by the standards of Mozart, however much he may have continued them, nor Berg by the standards of Wagner or Richard Strauss, nor Elliott Carter by the values of Ives and Stravinsky."

"Our freedom is hemmed in on every side. We must be grateful for what remains."

"Understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it."

"The explanation of this book is that the 1929 depression was so wide, so deep, and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and U.S. unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilizing it by discharging five functions:(1) maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods; (2) providing countercyclical, or at least stable, long­ term lending; (3) policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates; (4) ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies; (5) acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in financial crisis."

"More positively, taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension, the proof that we understand it, and we may extend that to sympathy with other listeners' enjoyment ..."

"The eventual survival of the tradition is ultimately not at stake."

"Mendelssohn is the inventor of religious kitsch in music. His first essay in this genre is a masterpiece, the Fugue in E Minor, published in 1837 but written ten years earlier, when the composer was eighteen ..."

"Nevertheless, music will not acknowledge a context greater than itself—social, cultural, or biographical—to which it is conveniently subservient. To paraphrase Goethe's grandiose warning to the scientist: do not look behind the notes, they themselves are the doctrine."

"It was this indifference to the quality of his material that earned Liszt the contempt of his most distinguished contemporaries and of many of the most respectable critics and historians of posterity. It was, nevertheless, his greatest strength. It made it possible for him to manipulate the material ruthlessly, to concentrate on effects of realization with unprecedented intensity, and to integrate styles and techniques of performance into composition in a new way. His invention of novel keyboard effects and his mastery of musical gesture have always been undervalued, especially by pianists of the German school who prefer the kind of music that can be executed while soulfully regarding the ceiling. On the whole, the most genuine understanding of his music has been displayed by musicians of eastern Europe, and he may almost be considered as the founder of Russian pianism."

"The absolutely inaudible is rejected from music during the period of Viennese Classicism in which every musical line is potentially or imaginatively audible, but it makes a dramatic reappearance in the music of Schumann. The most striking of many examples is one of the episodes in the Humoresk, the last of the great piano works of Schumann's early years. ... There are three staves: the uppermost for the right hand; the lowest for the left; the middle, which contains the melody, is not to be played. Note that the melody is no more to be imagined as a specific sound than it is to be played: nothing tells us that the melody is to be heard as vocal or instrumental. This melody, however, is embodied in the upper and lower parts as a kind of after-resonance-out of phase, delicate, and shadowy."

"The world has lost a great soul, whose passion was music and humanity."

"In 1942, Menuhin conducted for the first time. In the years that followed, he led the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C., among others. He taught students around the world. He established the Gstaad Festival in Switzerland and directed the Bath Festival in England. In 1963, he founded the world-renowned Yehudi Menuhin School in Stoke D'Aubernon, England. Menuhin became a British subject in 1985, was knighted in 1987 and became a life peer in 1993."

"Although he seemed almost the embodiment of the classical musician who was lost in the spiritual intensity of his art, he, in fact, devoted his 75-year career to a remarkably wide range of musical, humanitarian and even political activities--building cultural bridges that ranged from defying the political climate during the Cold War to a groundbreaking collaboration with Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in the 1960s."

"Yehudi Menuhin was a major figure in this century – an extraordinary musician and a great humanitarian. [...] His style of playing, particularly in his early years, was a stunning patrician elegance with a very natural musical line, which fitted the style of whatever composition."

"There is... no definitive interpretation for him but the search for repose, for a place where music, far from any pretension, vibrates naturally, where it can breathe more than show off."

"Yehudi Menuhin could play difficult violin pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Bach at age 7. He played in Carnegie Hall at 11. He was 12 when he made his first record. At 13, he'd played in the finest concert halls in Berlin, London, and Paris. At 19, he embarked on his first world tour – 110 concerts, 63 cities and 13 countries. Yet at 19 he couldn't play a simple A major scale or a basic three-octave arpeggio. And he'd never figured out music theory."

"He was one of the celebrities like author Aldous Huxley who was taught by B. K. S. Iyengar the Iyengar brand of yoga."

"For young Menuhin, each piece was a goal. Once he heard something he wanted to play, he'd focus his mind on it. He practiced at least four hours daily. When he could play one work perfectly, he simply moved on to the next."

"Menuhin worked to raise money for UNESCO and lobbied for racial equality in South Africa. He spoke out against narrow political nationalism in any form, including music. Not only did he create a rage for Indian raga music when he released his East Meets West [sic] recording with Shankar, he chipped away at the barriers between classical music and jazz by improvising with jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli."

"It wasn't enough to be a great soloist - Menuhin wanted to be a great leader in music. He wanted to teach, open a music school and conduct the world's best musical groups. Menuhin knew that if he wanted to teach a class or lead an orchestra, he couldn't rest on his past achievements. He needed to understand the steps he'd taken to play so well."

"So back to school he went. To nail down the way his fingers moved, Menuhin learned every scale imaginable. He learned to play them at every speed. He searched the library for books on violin technique. He went to the best teachers and asked them to explain things the books didn't say. He asked gymnasts and dancers for advice on the most precise way to move his bowing arm. To understand how to control his bowing better, he learned the names of each muscle in the back, upper arms, forearms and fingers. He studied drawings made by Leonardo da Vinci, so he'd know what hands looked like on the inside. Then Menuhin broke his performance down even more. Studying India's exercise system of yoga, he started to understand his breathing as he played."

"I imagine that whatever contribution I can make to teaching derives from having had to rethink and re-create my technique."

"The teacher offers guidance here and there, but the primary factor, the driving force, in your relationship and work together is the student's own commitment and desire to learn. Teaching is like sailing: The wind and the sails give the boat its motion. Your role (as a teacher) is to steer and guide."

"The idea that a pupil is a passive recipient, a container waiting to be filled by the teacher's knowledge and instruction - all this is nonsense. Teaching is a living relationship, of give and take, of mutual learning."

"The best teacher is the one who himself has had to struggle to learn."

"Even at the risk of losing all the golden eggs of the future, I had to find out what made the goose lay those eggs"

"Undoubtedly I had lost time in balking at scales, arpeggios. [...] There is an advantage in establishing the top story of one's constructions first: One has seen the heights; one knows what one is building for and what must be sustained."

"There comes a time when the student turns his back on the teacher. His playing cannot have the necessary security, autonomy, self-faith, or communicative power until he believes his interpretation is his own."

"[At age 7] In eight hours of concentrated practice between my twice-weekly lessons, I memorized the A major and played it for Persinger."

"It is absolutely vital to hold it as lightly as possible - rather as one might pick up a newborn bird."

"One should feel in the right arm the vibration of the bow hair on the strings. [...] The moment tension or hardness enters into the hand then of course the vibrations will not be felt- they cannot penetrate."

"Menuhin felt a close kinship with Stern, who also was born of Russian immigrants."

"This is the best and ultimate purpose of conducting: Not only to lead (the musicians) and keep them together, not only to make their performance easier and simpler, but also to guide them so that they can play as they have always longed to play."

"What fascinated my imagination was the tremendous feat, which I felt I should be perfectly able to accomplish."

"Learning an imposed method seemed not in my nature"

"To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal."

"We in the Western world have grown to understand matter as imprisoned light, and light as liberated matter, yet this has had no influence on our spiritual thought. In practical terms it only led to the creation of the atom bomb."

"When I was a boy no one seemed to ask where the energies come from. Land, oil, coal, air seemed inexhaustible. Now we are realizing how our very life depends upon restoring not only our balance with nature, but also that balance within ourselves. We are depleting our reserves of spirit, health, courage and faith at an alarming rate. The quiet practice of yoga is, in its humble yet effective way, an antidote."

"That India should offer me at once a homeland and a new-found land with lasting power to astonish seemed only right, for it is precisely the reconciling of contradictions Within an all-accepting unity that is the country's genius and its abiding appeal to me. India, I feel, has softened my Talmudical adjudications between right and wrong, upheld innocent acceptance of the lovely things of life, given me much that was new yet welcome, understandable, waiting to experienced."

"Working with no other orchestra gave me as much satisfaction as my work, as soloist and conductor, with the Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra."

"There were other gurus and other lessons, but not until I met Iyengar did I take up the study regularly. My first meeting with him was like the casting of a spell. We made each other's acquaintance in Mumbai. He appeared in my rooms one morning and straightaway made it clear that the "audition" to follow was mine as much as his. For all my celebrity, to him I was just another Western body knotted through and through."

"Despite predisposition in India's favor, I have to acknowledge that Indian music took me by surprise. I knew neither its nature nor its richness, but here, if anywhere, I found vindication of my conviction that India was the original source."

"First and foremost, yoga made its contribution to my quest to understand consciously the mechanics of violin playing, a quest which by 1951 had long been one of the themes of my life. All influences pointed to less tension, more effective application of energy, the breaking down of resistance in every joint, the coordination of all motions into one motion; and illustrated the profound truth that strength comes not from strength but from the subtle comprehension of process, proportion and balance."

"It was a true inspiration to spend as much time with them [Sinfonia Varsovia] as possible, to enjoy the deep satisfaction I derive from our music-making together."