Franz Liszt: “Het kan me niet schelen hoe snel je octaven kunt spelen. Wat ik wil horen is de galop van de paarden van de Poolse cavalerie voordat ze kracht verzamelen en de vijand vernietigen.”
Maria Callas: “Before you sing a phrase, you always prepare it in your face and give it to the public, have it read in your mind, in other words: you think of the phrase, you prepare it on your face and then you actually perform it. That is the beauty of bel canto; offering it to the public and having the public reading your mind and then actually hearing it”
“The history of musical analysis is full of expressions like “a kind of sonata form” , “a sort of rondo” which reveals the desperation of the writer to fit any and every piece into a predetermined form. But in any decent work of art, form is a by-product of material, subject-matter and workmanship, not a process of filling a template, like a dot-to-dot drawing or a do-it-yourself tapistry”.
music for flute, cymbalom and bass by Peter Lunow .
Marieke Schneemann, fluit
Michiel Weidtner, cymbalom
Ernst Glerum, contrabas
4 okt. 2018 . In een uitstekend boek over Debussy,”a painter in music”, van de muziekcriticus en musicoloog Stephen Walsh:
“With him ‘epater le bourgeois’ was never an issue; on the contrary his watchword was beauty and he honestly felt that attentive listeners would be able to hear and appreciate this quality if only they could shake off their attachment to the familiar and predictable in the standard repertoire. it turned out that they could. His music never seems to have created significant problems for audiences, although critics were wary of it because it didn’t meet their normal criteria of elucidation or assessment. Debussy’s main enemy was the Conservatoire and the book of rules that were supposed to tell you what you could and couldn’t do as a composer to respond to an inner voice.”
en
“Much of what happened to music-and in art in general-in the 20th century marked a break, conscious or not, with the 19th century. The past was an orphan parent, rejected by its children, despised by its grand-children. Debussy, too, found fault with his forebears and tried to do things differently from them, But while he questioned their methods, he never doubted their fundamental intention, which was to create beauty and to share sensibilities, to communicate wonder at the richness of the world around us and the various ways our senses give us of responding to it. His music is without ideology and without doctrine. Like the world, it simply is, take it or leave it.”