Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it. "
Terry Teachout
Knew
Music
Nobody
Related Quotes:
" I suspect that most playgoers don't understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings. "
Terry Teachout
Lines
Science
Understand
" Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. "
Terry Teachout
Artist
Us
Sometimes
" Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists. "
Terry Teachout
Us
Fact
Trumpet
" Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. "
Terry Teachout
Art
Want
Transformation
" It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art. "
Terry Teachout
Art
Balance
Best
" I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people. "
Terry Teachout
Say
People
Music
" I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember. "
Terry Teachout
Loved
Remember
Long
" The first play I ever saw - I was in junior high school - was a high school production of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit,' which seemed to me absolutely magical. "
Terry Teachout
School
Play
High School
" I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. "
Terry Teachout
Me
Never
Opera
" A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means - and change it as often as you like. "
Terry Teachout
Change
Like
Mind
" The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall. "
Terry Teachout
Go
Wonderful
Art
" The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres. "
Terry Teachout
See
Dramatic
Play
" Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets. "
Terry Teachout
American
Ignorant
Literature
" For the critic, the word 'best' is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely, and you're likely to get your hand blown off. "
Terry Teachout
Off
Best
Hand
" Needless to say, anybody who can stumble through a C-major scale knows that Art Tatum always gave his audiences 10 times their money's worth. "
Terry Teachout
Through
Worth
Say
" Most 'Monty Python' fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age. "
Terry Teachout
Baby
Age
Growing
" Maine likes to call itself 'America's Vacationland.' For many artists, though, it's the office. Since the 19th century, painters from all over the country - including Edward Hopper, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver and Andrew Wyeth - have spent large chunks of time there. "
Terry Teachout
Time
Office
America
" I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock. "
Terry Teachout
Know
Sick
New
" The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay. "
Terry Teachout
Film
Start
Right
" I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz. "
Terry Teachout
Years
Jazz
Professional
" Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.' "
Terry Teachout
Education
Experience
High
" I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television. "
Terry Teachout
Writing
American
Know
" The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics. "
Terry Teachout
You
Because
Bad
" No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit. "
Terry Teachout
Mountain
Path
Perfect
" In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are. "
Terry Teachout
Art
World
Perception
" Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way. "
Terry Teachout
Though
Music
Analysis
" 'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours. "
Terry Teachout
Man
Today
First
" At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction. "
Terry Teachout
Down
Best
Cold
" Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century. "
Terry Teachout
Art
World
Life
" Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. You don't see it. "
Terry Teachout
See
Direction
Art