Pianists

"With each technological ‘revolution’, more energies began to be accessed, stored, and used than had been in the preceding epoch…On the whole, technological change is irreversible: whatever the nature of a technological revolution, it is always from the hoe to the plough, and not the other way around…Improvement generally means greater efficiency in the use of energy, materials, or information. It means greater speed, less investment of time and money, and operation on a larger scale."

"We are living in a time of dissent, upheaval, revolutions and struggle, frequently aimed at mutual destruction."

"Just as organic species evolve toward the use of greater densities of a wider variety of free-energy sources in their environment, so human societies develop to access, store, and use in greater densities larger quantities of free energy through the ongoing improvement of their technologies. As a consequence societies, the same as natural systems, tend to grow larger in size, develop more intricate relations among their diverse components, and create more massive and flexible modes of interaction among them."

"A new level of organization means a simplification of system function, and of the corresponding system structure, it also means the initiation of a process of progressive structural and functional complexification."

"In the penultimate decade of the twentieth century science is sufficiently advanced to resolve the puzzles that stymied scientists in the last century and demonstrate, without metaphysical speculation, the consistency of evolution in all realms of experience. It is now possible to advance a general evolution theory based on unitary and mutually consistent concepts derived from the empirical sciences."

"One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science in the contemplations of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled wit awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation."

"The search for meaning is not limited to science: it is constant and continuous--all of us engage in it during all our waking hours the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating them."

"The natural philosophy of the new developments in the sciences is a systems philosophy. When properly articulated, it can give us both factual and normative knowledge. Exploring such knowledge and applying it in determining our future is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss. For if we do not, another chapter of terrestrial evolution will come to an end, and its unique experiment with rational consciousness will be written off as a failure."

"We may not be the center of the universe and the telos of evolution, but we are concrete embodiments of cosmic processes in their particular terrestrial variation. And, albeit accidentally, we did happen to evolve a most remarkable property: self -reflection. In virtue of this we may be among the very few species of natural systems in the universe which are able not only to sense the world and respond to it, but to know their own sensations and come to reasoned conclusions about the nature of the universe. To be a man is thus to have the almost unique opportunity of getting to know oneself and the world in which one lives. It is surely shortsighted to disregard this opportunity and confine oneself solely to the business of living. A failure to exploit our capability for rational knowledge is, moreover, contrary to the business of living."

"The systems view of nature and man is clearly non- anthropocentric, but it is not non-humanistic for all that. It allows us to understand that man is one species of system in a complex and embracing hierarchy of nature, and at the same time it tells us that all systems have value and intrinsic worth. They are goal-oriented, self-maintaining, and self-creating expressions of nature's penchant for order and adjustment. The status of man is not lessened by admitting the amoeba as his kin, nor by recognizing that sociocultural systems are his supersystems. Seeing himself as a connecting link in a complex natural hierarchy cancels man's anthropocentrism, but seeing the hierarchy itself as an expression of self-ordering and self-creating nature bolsters his self-esteem and encourages his humanism."

"Evolution may not “drive” toward humanoid qualities at all, even if it uses them under rather special circumstances. What evolution may be up to could be merely the continuing structuration of the biosphere through increased levels of communication between systems of one level, resulting in more integrated supersystems on the next."

"In some regions, under especially favorable conditions, the level of organization reaches that of enormously heavy organic substances, such as protein molecules and nucleic acids. Now the basic building blocks are given for the constitution of self-replicating units of still higher organizational level: cells. These systems maintain a constant flow of substances through their structures, imposing on it a steady-state with specific parameters. The inputs and outputs may achieve coordination with analogous units in the surrounding medium, and we are on our way toward multicellular phenomena. The resulting structures — organisms — are likewise steady-state patterns imposed steady-state patterns imposed on a continuous flow... The organic systems themselves, define the supra-organic (ecological or social) community. Ultimately the strands of communication straddle the space-time region within which the primary systems have come together, and those of its layers which provide conditions favorable to such structuration become organized as systems in their own right. We reach the level of the global (ecological, and on earth also sociocultural) system."

"Imagine a universe made up not of things in space and in time, but of patterned flows extending throughout its reaches. What flows is a mysterious, nonindividualized something we call energy. It flows along pathways structured by the metric of integral space-time. It flows smoothly, without crinks or wrinkles, over vast stretches of this cosmic matrix, and it becomes contorted in some regions."

"In the contemporary systems view man is not a sui generis phenomenon that can be studied without regard to other things. He is a natural entity, and an inhabitant of several interrelated worlds. By origin he is a biological organism. By work and play he is a social role carrier. And by conscious personality he is a Janus-faced link integrating and coordinating the biological and the social worlds. Man is, in the final analysis, a coordinating interface system in the multilevel hierarchy of nature."

"Opposed to atomism and behaviorism, the systems view of man links him again with the world he lives in, for he is seen as emerging in that world and reflecting its general character."

"Systems at each level of integration function as wholes with respect to their parts and parts with respect to higher level wholes."

"There is nothing supernatural about the process of self-organization to states of higher entropy; it is a general property of systems, regardless of their materials and origin. It does not violate the Second Law of thermodynamics since the decrease in entropy within an open system is always offset by the increase of entropy in its surroundings."

"Now "cybernetics" is the term coined by Wiener to denote "steersmanship" or the science of control. Although current engineering usage restricts it to the study of flows in closed systems, it can be taken in a wider context, as the study of processes interrelating systems with inputs and outputs, and their structural-dynamic structure. It is in this wider sense that "cybernetics" will be used here, to wit, as system-cybernetics, understanding by "system" an ordered whole in relation to its relevant environment (hence one actually or potentially open)."

"Even the brain, that most delicate and complex of all known organs, is not merely a lot of neurons added together. While a genius must have more of the gray matter than a sparrow, the idiot may have just as much as the genius. The difference between them must be explained in terms of how those substances are organized."

"The viola is the saddest of all instruments."

"I'm content with making records, but I don't want to be doing the same thing all the time."

"The avant-garde makes more sense to me."

"I learn from thinking about the future, what hasn't been done yet. That's kind of my constant obsession."

"John Cale is a f*cking elitist. He did not like the people he was playing for. He's Welsh, and they're all nasty bastards."

"Never knew whether John Cale wanted to be Elvis Presley, Frankenstein's creature or the young Chopin."

"John Cale is fantastic, and he made the sound of the Velvet Underground."

"I only hope that one day John will be recognized as … the Beethoven or something of his day. He knows so much about music, he's such a great musician. He's completely mad - but that's because he's Welsh."

"I'm bent on proving that you can make living as musician and not die young and crazy like Mozart."

"I am a ham. I've no business being rock 'n' roll. I've said it over and over again that I'm a classical composer, dishevelling my personality by dabbling in rock 'n' roll."

"I use cracks on the sidewalk to walk down the street. I'd always walk on the lines. I never take anything but a calculated risk, and do it because it gives me a sense of identity. Fear is a man's best friend."

"Being a living legend is such a precarious livelihood. It’s like being a bar of soap in a shower which doesn’t have any water in it."

"When somebody grabs a movement, you're kind of locked into it. It's all par for the course."

"The only reason we wore sunglasses onstage was because we couldn't stand the sight of the audience."

"If you're all loaded up on love, you haven't got anywhere else to go."

"The value of having a computer, to me, is that it'll remember everything you do. It's a databank."

"Moreover, most of the child composers known from the second half of the century composed relatively little: only Strauss (1864–1949) and Busoni (1866–1924) produced works in numbers that rival those of Mozart and Mendelssohn, with Bartók (1881–1945), Enescu (1881–1955), Prokofiev (1891–1953), Langgaard (1893–1952), and Korngold (1897–1957) some way behind."

"Another noteworthy fact is that Ferruccio Busoni, who also developed the Liszt piano tradition, began his teaching career at the Moscow Conservatoire. He worked there only one year (1889-90) but among his students was Yelena Gnesina."

"What most piano teachers mean by a beautiful tone is centered on bringing out the melody, and always setting the melody in high relief is characteristic of Viennese piano style. Ferrucio Busoni, ideologically more Viennese than Italian, once said that “any melody worth playing should be played mezzo forte”; in the end, this leads to the typical conservatory performance of a Bach fugue with the opening motif played louder than all the other voices each time it appears. Most theories about beautiful piano tone try to impose the same kind of sound on every style from Bach to Debussy."

"Despite the important ideas and stimuli for new works that his presence in the United States brought him, Busoni's interest in America appeared to be in the financial reward that he could reap from concert tours. Frequent performances and constant travel undoubtedly took precious time from his composing schedule, which might help to explain the negative comments that he made about the United States, its people, and the state of music-making in this country. Extended periods of absence from the cultural ambience of Europe, where he had been raised, was painful for him, as were the countless receptions that he attended with well-meaning amateurs, as well as the constant pressure for publicity by his agent and, above all, the cultural differences between Europe and America."

"Like Liszt, for whom he had a profound admiration, Ferruccio Busoni devoted a significant part of his output to arrangement in all its forms: straightforward reductions, transcriptions, fantasies on operatic themes, concert versions, and Nachdichtungen. Indeed, for many years, Busoni's name his been unfortunately associated more with his transcriptions, especially those of Johann Sebastian Bach's organ works, than with his original compositions."

"Serkin began to record in the late 1920s. His first effort was on piano rolls with the Freiburg firm of Welte. Its Welte-Mignon recording and playing mechanisms had yielded over five thousand rolls since 1904, rendering ghostly, automated performances by many of the period’s best-known composers and pianists, including Saint-Saens, Grieg, Fauré, Mahler, Paderewski, Debussy, D’Albert, Strauss, Busoni, Scriabin, Ravel, Respighi, and Bartók."

"Serkin and Busch prepared Busoni’s second violin sonata for performance. Busoni gave them an audience and was pleased with their performance. (He told Serkin he was too old for lessons, but that he should attend as many concerts as possible and play with more pedal.) Shortly afterward, Serkin and Busch heard Busoni and Egon Petri play the same piece (on November 16, 1921 in the Beethoven-Saal, in an arrangement for two pianos) at twice their tempo."

"Berlin’s most eminent musical personality in the early interwar years was the great pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni, who had returned there from Zurich in 1920, summoned, like Schreker, to help build the cultural life of the new Republic."

"Busch suggested that Serkin should go to Berlin to study with Ferruccio Busoni (who, as it happens, was a close friend of Isidor Philipp’s). “The next day,” concludes Leonie Gombrich, “father Serkin came, and everything was settled.”"

"Until the autumn of 1934 I had no harpsichord of my own. But a group of people in Boston made it possible for me to buy the Dolmetsch-Chickering instrument that had belonged to Busoni (illus.1). I used this instrument for the first time in Boston at the Harvard Musical Association. This concert began inauspiciously enough with my leaving behind the key to the instrument in Cambridge, and having to send someone to fetch it."

"Compared with this art, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire is lukewarm lemonade."

"Music is the art of sounds in the movement of time."

"I fell in love with you first time I looked into Them there eyes. You've got a certain li'l cute way of flirtin' with Them there eyes."

"So rare, You're like the sparkle of old champagne; Orchids in cellophane Couldn't compare to you."

"I may seem proud; I may act gay, It's just a pose; I'm not that way, .'Cause deep down in my heart I say, I surrender, dear."