Think: if you were a composer, given this space, what kind of sounds would you fill it with?
Would you put an orchestra on the platform, or a choir on the tiers? Would you place a harp opposite the piano? And last, given the possibility that organ offers, would you do without and just let it sit there?
Or would you even go beyond the pipe organ to use uncommon instruments such as bagpipe, accordion, harmonica, or saxophone?
If you used voices, what words would you have them sing? Or would you have them just singing, with no words at all?
Here are some things that others have said.
The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are the highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way. The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold-and yet if you’d never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn’t believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed. Perhaps art can show something of that, can glimpse the future possibilities pregnant within the present time.
Nicholas Wright, from Simply Christian: Why
Christianity Makes Sense (2010): 235
The fact is, music is music. Some of it you like, some you don’t. Some will stand the test of time and some won’t. Ethnicity and race have very little to do with it.
Flutist and music historian Dorothy Antoinette Handy, on the term
“classical music” (many other musicians have said similar things . . . )
There still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.
Arthur Clarke, The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 5, page 37
Human beings should really try to be aware of their information diet and the company they keep because such stimuli are actually changing our brain and cognitive systems in a very real and very physical way.
Bobby Azarian, cognitive neuroscientist
associated with George Mason University
It is therefore reasonable to think that the creations of man are made either with a view to his body, and that is the principle we call utility, or with a view to his soul, and that is what he seeks under the name of beauty.
Paul Valéry, Eupalinos, or The Architect (1921)
Writing music is more than putting notes on paper. It’s a matter of listening and hearing and making determinations.
George Walker, interview with Mark Stryker of
The Detroit Free Press published March 3, 2015
One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
James Baldwin “Autobiographical Notes”
opening Notes of a Native Son (1955)
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Jean Cocteau, as quoted in Newsweek May 16, 1955
What I love about music: it connects me with the universe, it makes me in contact with every human being, with who I am actually–music is not just what your ear can hear, but what your body and soul can experience.
Egyptian American composer Halim El-Dabh, from 2013 interview
with Maha El Nabawi for The National UAE newspaper
Math . . . music . . . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It’s a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it’s not. It’s an essentially human experience.
Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the
Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (2009)
The arts, . . . are an essential means by which communities and cultures find meaning and engage with the world. And the same is true for individuals–each of us uses the arts in ways that help us make sense of the world. The arts are a means for us to shape our identity, consider the future, and determine what we want that future to be like. The arts are also crucial to advancing democracy: they are a means to animating civil society, they provide us with creative methods of dealing with differences among us, and, by doing so, they help us create common cause and shared purpose with society. So, starting at the individual level and moving through each layer of society, the arts are fundamentally tied to a strong and vibrant democracy. And when foundations fund arts and culture groups with an explicit purpose of advancing social justice, they are contributing to participatory parity and moving us closer to a more just and equitable world.
“A Special Opportunity for Arts and Culture Funders to Advance
Democracy,” December 6, 2011 by Aaron Dorfman, executive
director, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy
The greatest artist belongs inevitably to his country as much as the humblest singer in a remote village—they and all those who come between them are links in the same chain, manifestations on their different levels of the same desire for artistic expression, and, moreover, the same nature of artistic expression.
Ralph Vaughan Williams to an audience at Bryn Mawr College, 1932
speaking as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society
The truth may be puzzling.
It may take some work to grapple with.
It may be counterintuitive.
It may contradict deeply held prejudices.
It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true.
But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
Carl Sagan, “Wonder and Skepticism”,
Skeptical Inquirer, January-February 1995
Judgement is separable from opinion in matters of artistic and scientific excellence. It is possible to distinguish the important from the trivial, the fine from the coarse, the credible from the meretricious, the elegant from the vulgar. Doing so is not a simple matter, and no single observer is infallible, but a realm of objective knowledge about excellence exists.
Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of
Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BCE to 1950 (2003)
Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
(often given as)
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. “Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table”, The Atlantic, September 1858
Music’s wordless gospel proclaims in a universal language what the thirsting human soul is seeking beyond this life.
Bruno Walter, autobiography (1947)
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus, Notebooks (1935-42)
Everywhere the wasteland grows. Woe to him whose wasteland is within.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zoroaster (1883-85)