The art of music enables men to experience time physically during their lives in a manner unavailable though any other medium.
Lothar Klein, in “Music Education Journal,” Sept. 1973, 67.
Nr. 33
Schooling offers students no opportunity to discover and develop their potential as human beings. They are violently and systematically uprooted from their first world, the world of myth and image … They are given no chance to bring into play their innate wisdom or their natural capacity for seeing that reality which lies beyond appearances. Their creative, imaginative, communicative, and affective channels are completely obstructed, the doors of their perception closed. Thus do we convert healthy, lucid children, blessed with an inexhaustible store of innate wisdom, into paralyzed, stupefied, and totally disoriented adolescents, incapable of doing anything on their own initiative except destroy in the same measure as we have destroyed them. The senselessness and destruction of life, and not the joy of living, is the only lesson they learn, from bitter experience, under the present system of schooling.
Dorothy Ling, “The Original Art of Music,” 67
Nr. 34
I am simply calling attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except torture.
George Bernard Shaw
Nr. 35
Performance has nothing to do with the score, because in a performance something is coming into existence for the first time, even if you have played it 300 times before. If that doesn’t happen, if it isn’t the first time, then the creative act is not authentic, not true. We are just making music from memory … Anyone who still hasn’t got past the stage of the beauty of music still knows nothing about music. Music is not beautiful. It has beauty as well, but the beauty is just the bait. Music is truth.
Sergiu Celibidache, in “LA Philharmonic Notes,” April, 1989
Nr. 36
Although I find it necessary and refreshing to think about music, I am always conscious of the fact that feeling must remain the Alpha and Omega of a musician.
Alfred Brendel, in “The New Yorker,” May 30, 1977.
Nr. 37
I suggest that teachers should be good trades-unionists and in such matters as correcting others and giving good advice we should not work overtime without extra pay.
Gustav Holst, Lecture at Yale in 1929 on the Teaching of Art
Nr. 38
Those who can, do: those who can’t, teach.
George Bernard Shaw
That remark of Shaw is not essentially true. Teaching is not an alternative to doing. Teaching is doing. Teaching is an art.
Gustav Holst, Lecture at Yale in 1929 on the Teaching of Art
Nr. 39
By technique I mean the means by which you express yourself. And the method of acquiring technique is, for nearly all of us, Hard Work.
Gustav Holst, Lecture at Yale in 1929 on the Teaching of Art.
Nr. 40
In musical circles, a few years ago, we were told: “We cannot make all our children good singers and players, therefore let us make them good listeners.” I agree, on condition that we remember that the surest way of becoming a good listener is to first try to sing or play.
Gustav Holst, Lecture at Yale in 1929 on the Teaching of Art