People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.
Say to your own minds, "I am He, I am He". Let it ring day and night in your minds like a song, and at the point of death declare : "I am He". That is truth; the infinite strength of the world is yours.
Do you know out of what the German Empire arose? Out of dreams, songs, fantasies and black-red-gold ribbons? Bismarck merely shook the tree that fantasies had planted.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.
Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
Being is so significant that it is irreplaceable. You are just yourself. Do something that comes out of you - not to assert, but to express! Sing your song, dance your dance, rejoice in being whatever nature has chosen you to be.
Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much you approach the songs in pretty much the same way. The difference might be that in a film you have a close up. On stage you don't. So there are more songs on the stage because the songs are kind of the close up.
A well-composed song strikes the mind and softens the feelings, and produces a greater effect than a moral work, which convinces our reason, but does not warm our feelings, nor effect the slightest alteration in our habits
The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart….. I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house….. But the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house; I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.