Sparks

• Nicolosi

  2007 Oct 13

  You know you've encountered the beautiful when you feel yourself challenged or called (from the Greek "kalen"). Now that's different from having an emotional response completely. The beautiful disturbs you in a good way.
  
  Beauty also solves the problem of the garden, which was "you shall be like God," because when you experience the beautiful, you feel humble and small, but you're okay with it because you feel gifted, and that "fixes" the garden's temptation that "you should be God." No! I'm not God, and I'm okay not being God.
  
  So, that's why we need the beautiful and that's why we need it in the Church, because you want people to pray. That's where you start. You get them to feel humble, and you get them to feel the glory of God, and okay with it and now they can pray.
  
  That we're not taking advantage of that power of the arts when we go to worship is, to me, demonic.
  
  Barbara Nicolosi
  summarizing an essay by Joseph Ratzinger "Beauty and the Face of Christ"
  on a tv interview
  

• Marceau

  2007 Sep 25

  If you love your art, you just do it.
  
  Marcel Marceau (1923-2007)
  1999 interview in the South China Morning Post
  

• Pius X

  2007 Sep 14

  Church music must be true art, since in no other way can it have that effect on the mind of those who hear it which the Church intends of music in her liturgy.
  

• Lawrence

  2007 Sep 08

  Unawareness of the primary beat leads to sluggishness; unawareness of the compound beat leads to monotony.
  
  Michael E. Lawrence
  http://www.thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com/
  

• Seitz

  2007 Sep 05

  "We are introduced to Mr. Vandermark as he toils on a new composition at his workshop in the basement of his Chicago home, and watch him scratch out phrases on paper, then test them on saxophone and piano. We see him perform for various audiences; hear him explain his optimistic but uncompromising theory that atonal music suits the tone of modern life; and listen in as he figures out how he’s going to maintain his artistic integrity while making the rent.
  
  In one early scene the director splits the screen to show Mr. Kraus working the phone in his home office, effusively thanking a patron for a gig, and then sheepishly informing a creditor that he won’t be able to settle up until next month. Those seeking a nutshell definition of what it means to be a committed artist need look no further."
  
  Matt Zoller Seitz
  in a New York Times review of "Musician"
  a documentary film by Daniel Kraus
  

• Benedict 16

  2007 Aug 04

  "The training in singing, to sing in chorus, is not only an exercise of external listening and of the voice; it is also training for interior listening, listening with the heart, an exercise in training for life and for peace."
  
  from a short speech following a choir concert in Mirabello
  July, 2007
  

• Gajard

  2007 Aug 03

  It is interesting to note that in Gregorian chant, art and prayer are inseparable; they are so closely bound together that they cannot be disassociated. The Chant cannot be sung well without prayer, neither can we pray well without singing well too. There is a certain parity between the social prayer of the Catholic Church and the inspired melodies in which it is interpreted and expressed. The composers of the Middle Ages were truly inspired, and in their melodies we find the very essence of Christianity.
  
  The Rhythm of Plainsong (1943)
  Dom Joseph Gajard
  

• Houghton

  2007 Aug 01

  Why choose the musical form to tell a story about two women who lived for the printed page?
  
  “Because they are intellectual people, I thought it was very important to also make them emotional people,” Ms. Houghton said, “and the best way to make them emotional people was through song.”
  
  Neil Genzlinger
  New York Times - August 1, 2007
  article on "Bookends" by Katharine Houghton
  

• Meltzer

  2007 Jul 30

  STACKS of scores and CDs pile up on the desk of Chad Smith, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's vice president of artistic planning. Each represents an aspiring composer's dream of a Philharmonic performance or commission.
  
  "I'd say we probably get 30 to 50 submissions a month," Smith says, before adding discouragingly, "To be fair, 98% of blind submissions are things that we can't program."
  
  Multiply that scene by almost every orchestra office in the country and you have an idea of the difficulties faced by fledgling composers.
  
  

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  So what's an ambitious composer to do? In fact, conversations with several dozen suggest a variety of strategies. Some are forming ensembles. Others are starting festivals, webcasting or setting up streaming audio sites. And just about everyone has found an alternative way to pay the bills. The only thing that's certain is that waiting for a cloudburst of opportunities is not an option.
  
  

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  His (Harold Meltzer's) career sums up everyone's so far: Be prepared to go the distance, but in your own way. "It doesn't seem consoling to tell people to persevere, to have faith in their work," he says. "But there is no other way."
  
  Chris Pasles
  Los Angeles Times
  July 22, 2007
  

• Childs

  2007 Jul 30

  But the profession's two cruelest characteristics – perfection and isolation – soon bothered him. Though essentially nothing about the way good violins are made has changed since Stradivarius, the craft is exhaustively exacting. Childs wasn't certain he'd reach its standards for perfection. He also wasn't certain that he wanted to: It required toiling in quiet solitude, and he sometimes felt lonely.
  
  So he quit. He started painting classes and began a search for his roots; Childs had been given up for adoption as an infant, shuttled between foster homes, and finally adopted when he was 3. Though he remembers little of that time, the mystery nagged him. In his early 30s, he began a search for his birth mother. During the search, he had a gripping dream that changed everything about violins for him. In the dream, Childs wanted to visit an unknown country, but he was stopped by a border guard who took him into a small room, dark and empty but for a table with a violin. A guard told Childs to pick up the violin; he obeyed. Inlaid into the back, was an image of a small boy crying," he remembers.
  
  For the first time, he realized making violins was more than a living for him: The craft, he says, helped him express experiences "that don't necessarily have language."
  
  After that, his fiddles changed: Their tone was more even, their voice more consistent. Players who bought his early instruments and traded up as he improved didn't feel the need to any longer. And Childs found an answer for the isolation: He got a doctorate, one night class at a time, in psychology, and opened a psychotherapy practice. In some sense it isn't all that different from making violins. He listens for things without language and whittles away until a patient, like an instrument, finds a hidden voice.
  
  Jina Moore
  Christian Science Monitor
  July 26, 2007