Pianists From The United States

"I’m deeply grateful to be Jewish. I feel it’s enriched my life and I feel very strongly about Jewishness."

"I sat reading in these chairs and felt somehow, in an abstract rather than a religious way, that suffering shapes you. Not only my own religious thought, but that of my ancestors, affected me in some way. The thing we have as Jews is that it’s a wonderfully abstract religion. Images are not allowed, so it’s welcome to abstract thought."

"I wouldn’t play it in public — you need different muscles, you can’t use the upper arm, just the fingers. But the sound has a glow, because the strings aren’t damped, as on a piano. I wanted to visit Bach’s sound world, then apply those ideas to the piano."

"I propose to create an heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire all people, completely free from fads, artificial mannerisms and false sophistications, direct, forceful, sincere, always original but never unnatural. Music must be freed from decadence and stagnation. There has been too much emphasis on small things while the great truths have been overlooked. The superficial must be dispensed with. Music must become virile to express big things. It is not my purpose to supply a few pseudo intellectual musicians and critics with more food for brilliant argumentation, but rather to inspire all mankind with new heroism and spiritual nobility. This may appear to be sentimental and impossible to some, but it must be remembered that Palestrina, Handel, and Beethoven would not consider it either sentimental or impossible. In fact, the worthiest creative art has been motivated consciously or unconsciously by the desire for the regeneration of mankind."

"The greater the emotional intensity, the greater the simplicity."

"My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound."

"We are in a very dangerous period. We are in danger of destroying ourselves, and I have a great fear about this…The older generation is ruling ruthlessly. I feel that this is a terrible threat to our civilization. It's the greed of huge companies and huge organizations which control life in a kind of a brutal way…It's gotten worse and worse, somehow, because physical science has given us more and more terrible deadly weapons, and the human spirit has been destroyed in so many cases, so what's the use of having the most powerful country in the world if we have killed the soul. It's of no use."

"Two birds on a wire One tries to fly away And the other watches him close from that wire He says he wants to as well But he is a liar"

"Try it again, breathing's just a rhythm"

"Leaves become most beautiful when they're about to die When they're about to fall from trees When they're about to dry"

"No one laughs at God in a hospital, No one laughs at God in a war, No one's laughing at God when they're starving or freezing or so very poor..."

"No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door And they say "We've got some bad news, sir." No one's laughing at God when there's a famine, fire or flood But God can be funny At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke Or when the crazies say He hates us And they get so red in the head you think they're 'bout to choke God can be funny When told he'll give you money if you just pray the right way And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus God can be so hilarious..."

"I've got a perfect body But sometimes I forget I've got a perfect body, because my eyelashes catch my sweat Yes they do, they do."

"No one's laughing at God — We're all laughing with God."

"Living in your pre-war apartment Soon to be your post-war apartment"

"It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song You can't believe it; you were always singing along It was so easy and the words so sweet You can't remember; you try to move your feet."

"People are just people They shouldn't make you nervous The world is everlasting, it's coming and it's going If you don't toss your plastic The streets won't be so plastic And if you kiss somebody then both of you get practice"

"I never loved nobody fully Always one foot on the ground And by protecting my heart truly I got lost in the sounds I hear in my mind All these voices I hear in my mind all these words I hear in my mind all this music And it breaks my heart It breaks my heart..."

"Imagine you go away On a business trip one day And when you come back home Your children have grown And you never made your wife moan"

"On the radio We heard November Rain That solo's awful long But it's a good refrain"

"A man destined to fry Can never ever ever die... In any other way but frying. Lucky that I'm dying By hanging and not drowning."

"The flowers you gave me are rotting And still I refuse to throw them away"

"This is how it works — You're young until you're not You love until you don't You try until you can't You laugh until you cry You cry until you laugh And everyone must breathe Until their dying breath."

"They'll name a city after us And later say it's all our fault…"

"The world's got a nosebleed, it said And we're flooding, but we keep on cutting the trees and the forests! And we keep on paying those freaks on the TV Who claim they will save us, but want to enslave us, and Sweating like demons, they scream through our speakers But we leave the sound on 'cause silence is harder, and No one's the killer and no one's the martyr The world that has made us can no longer contain us And prophets are silent and rotting away."

"On the day that Daniel Cowman stopped existing The world should have ended right then and there At precisely four-fifteen when he stopped existing The world should have ended How could it go on?"

"Love is the answer to a question I have forgotten, but I know I've been asked. And the answer has got to be love."

"How could it go on when I don't exist? I don't exist... So now that we've got that straight Doesn't mean that I can fly Doesn't mean I that I can go do whatever I want."

"Water, salt, cucumbers, garlic and"

"A man destined to hang Can never drown, A man destined to hang Can never ever drown. A man destined to drown Can never burn..."

"No, this is how it works — You peer inside yourself You take the things you like And try to love the things you took And then you take that love you made And stick it into some Someone else's heart Pumping someone else's blood And walking arm in arm You hope it don't get harmed But even if it does You'll just do it all again."

"Pickling spices"

"Pavlov's Daughter, woke up in the morning, hear the bell ring, and something deep inside of her, makes her want to salivate, so she lays there drooling on her pillow..."

"I'm the king's thirty-second son There's thirty-one others just like me There's thirty-one others on the way There's thirty-one others after that..."

"He was perfect except for the fact that he was an engineer And mothers prefer doctors And lawyers Yet despite this imperfection He was clean-looking and respectable-looking And you'll never find a mother Who doesn't appreciate a natural man"

"Thirty-two's still a goddamn number Thirty-two's still counts Gonna make it count"

"Pickle jars are just pickle jars, and pickles are just pickles."

"Ingredients:"

"Power to the people We don't want it We want pleasure And the TVs try to rape us And I guess that they're succeeding And we're going to these meetings But we're not doing any meeting And we're trying to be faithful, but we're Cheating, cheating, cheating"

"[I]t's only good songs that last, not good rhythm, and in the first six years or so of his composing George was interested mainly in developing new rhythms."

"George died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to."

"Porgy is…an interesting example of what can be done by talent in spite of a bad setup. With a libretto that should never have been accepted on a subject that should never have been chosen, a man who should never have attempted it has written a work that has a considerable power."

"The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together – with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky…but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter."

"Gershwin's tragedy was not that he failed to cross the tracks, but rather that he did, and once there in his new habitat, was deprived of the chance to plunge his roots firmly into the new soil."

"It would have been better if you had died and Gershwin had written the elegy."

"If jazz should threaten to become a hampering stereotype, a "tradition" in its turn, George would go forward to the next fresh impulse that arose in him. You may call him the King of jazz and associate his name with the lifting of jazz into musical artistry. Very well, and his best thanks. But not on that account is he to be thrust into a pigeonhole. George Gershwin did not begin as a jazzer; he will not end as one."

"Gershwin's melodic gift was phenomenal. His songs contain the essence of New York in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-century folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular music which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it)."

"When jazz is played in another nation, it is called American. When it is played in another country, it sounds false. Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America."

"An entire composition written in jazz could not live."

"A skyscraper is at the same time a triumph of the machine and a tremendous emotional experience, almost breath-taking. Not merely its height but its mass and proportions are the result of an emotion, as well as of calculation."