Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

" Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. "

" Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written. "

" I can remember - barely - when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs. "

" 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. "

" Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own. "

Terry Teachout

Though

Talking

" What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone. "

" I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II. "

" To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art. "

" Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. "

Terry Teachout

Artist

Sometimes

" All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves. "

" It's said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black and white. If this is so, I suspect it's because such films portray an America that no longer exists. "

" Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood. "

" '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. "

" Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood. "

" Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it. "

" Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special. "

" Not surprisingly, my parents' generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn't do us any good from a cultural point of view. I'm struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age. "

" It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much. "

" 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. "

" The script of a play is not a finished product: It's a set of instructions. "

" 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. "

" For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate. "

" There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative. "

" Ai Weiwei, who is both a widely admired conceptual artist and a fearless human-rights activist, has been on the bad side of the Chinese government for years. "

" Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz. "

" I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so. "

" All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz. "

" You don't have to know anything about the Shakers to appreciate Mr. Copland's score for 'Appalachian Spring' any more than you have to know who William Randolph Hearst was to understand 'Citizen Kane.' "

" One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor. "