Category Archives: Anecdotes

What they say about the trombone: quotations

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trombonist enrages neighbor. trombone quotations

Enraged Neighbor, a lithograph by Bourdin after an image by Robert William Buss (1838). The handle on the slide indicates a bass trombone

Looking back over everything I have written in this blog, I noticed it has been a while since I offered any quotations. And I have never offered quotations about the trombone. And so I figured I’d have a fairly easy time of going to the usual quotation sites and picking some good ones.

Wrong. I couldn’t find very many interesting trombone quotes at all.

This one from Trombone Shorty might explain why: Continue reading →

4 interesting facts about music history, and one questionable anecdote!

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composers interesting facts about music history

History means more than dates and battles. Classical music history means more than lists of compositions.

It’s personalities that make it interesting.

Sometimes, for example, composers and their associates go to desperate means to solve a problem.

People have loved classical music anecdotes as long as classical music has existed. Writers have long supplied trivia about musical personalities, including themselves, to an eager readership.

Most have stuck to the facts, but occasionally a story has broken into print with no corroborating evidence. But hey, that just makes it fiction. It’s still a good read. Continue reading →

What is music? Classical composer quotes

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composers quotationsYou know what music is when you hear it. Then again, someone else might have a completely different idea. One person’s music is another person’s noise.

So what is music? And where does it come from?

It’s not as if anyone can actually define it, but composers have expressed their opinions. What did they think they were doing? Here are some famous composers’ quotes Continue reading →

Composers: quotations about other composers

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composers quotationsAs a lover of classical music, you enjoy the music of many composers, but dislike others.

Composers are no different, except that they are required to study other composers’ music carefully whether they like it or not, both their contemporaries and generations of earlier composers.

Perhaps you have never heard of Brian Ferneyhough. Living composers are little known to today’s public, but he made the observation more eloquently than I can:

“Composers dialogue – and obsessively, bitterly argue – with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.” Continue reading →

5 great stories about great composers

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Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert. Detail from a watercolor portrait (1825) by Wilhelm August Rieder. Public domain.

It is quite possible to enjoy or appreciate music, or any other artform, without knowing anything about the person who created it. But in whatever form, art is a human creation.

Real people composed classical music. Real people have personalities, and knowing something about those personalities can put a human face on the music and rescue it from being a mere object.

Enjoy these glimpses into moments in the lives of the people whose music brings so much pleasure.

Franz Schubert

Between March 1811 and October 1828, Schubert wrote more than 600 songs, not to mention symphonies, church music, operas, chamber music, and piano pieces. He averaged 35 songs every year, which amounts to two or three every month. How could he keep track of all that music? He didn’t. Continue reading →

A literary dozen: quotations about music

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According to Aaron Copland, “If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.” What do you think about the following examples?

buy classical musicTake a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist – G. K. Chesterton

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable. – Samuel Johnson

Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer. – John Ruskin

Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a-dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey to an interminable tedious sweetness; Continue reading →