Orts #730

A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
     – Dmitri Shostakovich, in a letter to Isaac Glikman, 1955

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
     — Oscar Wilde, in the Introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray

You can’t have Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is.
     — Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor and music director, San Francisco Symphony

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
     -- Dorothey Parker