Orts #840

  Composing is like playing with building blocks, where new buildings are created again and again, using the same blocks. Indeed, these blocks have been there, ready to be used, since childhood, the only time that is designed for gathering.
     -- Gustav Mahler, in a letter to Natalie Bauer-Lechner


  This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
     —Leonard Bernstein, on the assassination of John F. Kennedy


  Both his science and his life were undergirded by a profound reverence for music— music seemed to be this intellectual giant’s greatest form of spirituality. He knew that the life of the mind and the life of the body were one, and understood that music married the two— an understanding he carried in his synapses and his sinews.
     -- Maria Popova, on Oliver Sacks, https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/31/remembering-oliver-sacks/


  Don’t expect good music when the band leader doesn’t know his brass from his oboe.
   — Bill Corcoran (1951-  )

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An ancient whistling language in danger of dying out:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/videos/#226805