Sonatas Quotes - Page 2

• Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.

  Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Years, Two, Musical

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• A strange adventure befell me while I was playing my Sonata in B flat minor before some English friends. I had played the Allegro and the Scherzo more or less correctly. I was about to attack the March when suddenly I saw arising from the body of my piano those cursed creatures which had appeared to me one lugubrious night at the Chartreuse. I had to leave for one instant to pull myself together after which I continued without saying anything.

  Frederic Chopin

  Adventure, Night, Piano

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• The other option we have are medication treatments. So you'll have the treatments such as Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata, and we'll also have Rozerem and for some patients we use Benzodiazopine/Clonazepam. Things like that to help with anxiety.

  Shelby Harris

  Anxiety, Use, Helping

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• I think anybody who's willing to really sink their teeth into a work like the Hammerklavier, which is a very interesting, different experience, should look instead at something like the Sonata by Paul Dukas, which, in my opinion, is a real marvel.

  Marc-Andre Hamelin

  Real, Thinking, Different Experiences

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. November 8, 2013.

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• Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.

  Frank Stella

  Writing, Ideas, Too Much

  Source: www.wbur.org

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• I grew up with classical music when I was a ballet dancer. Now when I have to prepare an emotional scene, to cry or whatever, I listen to sonatas. Vivaldi and stuff. It's just beautiful to me.

  Diane Kruger

  Beautiful, Emotional, Ballet Class

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• The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

  Diane Ackerman

  Dream, Children, Blood

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of Love: Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses”, p.151, Vintage

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• Many Introverts are also "highly sensitive," which sounds poetic, but is actually a technical term in psychology. If you are a sensitive sort, then you're more apt than the average person to feel pleasantly overwhelmed by Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" or a well-turned phrase or an act of extraordinary kindness. You may be quicker than others to feel sickened by violence and ugliness, and you likely have a very strong conscience.

  Susan Cain

  Strong, Kindness, Average

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.14, Broadway Books

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• My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun... they are the sun's kisses.

  Alexander Scriabin

  Kissing, Sun, Born

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• Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.

  Jacques Barzun

  Knowledge, Knowing, Judging

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• Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the "Mona Lisa" painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

  Alfred Whitney Griswold

  God, Spring, Creativity

  1957 Baccalaureate address, 9 Jun.

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• As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven's last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

  Jeremy Denk

  Finals, Movement, Thumbs

  "Every Good Boy Does Fine" by Jeremy Denk, www.newyorker.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Tokyo Sonata speaks to us, with feeling and passion, as one of the most eloquent statements on the world today that we are likely to see in this moviegoing year.

  Andrew Sarris

  Passion, Years, Feelings

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• The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.

  Rollo May

  Heart, Views, Sunrise

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.10, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Writing, Piano, Novelists

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• Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
  The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
  For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
  Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.

  John Ashbery

  Music, Horse, Past

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• For me, even my break time I like to pull out the bow and just go over a Vivaldi sonata and keep my head sharp, keep everything sharp.

  Chris Wyse

  Vivaldi, Bows, Break

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• What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

  H. L. Mencken

  War, Writing, Character

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.173, Vintage

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• I really love how the andante from the "A minor Sonata" sounds on the mandolin.

  Chris Thile

  Sound, Minors

  "Chris Thile Looks Back To Bach". "Weekend Edition" with Rachel Martin, www-s4.npr.org. August 11, 2013.

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