"Composer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... things had endured for two weeks, and the symphonic poem was progressing as well as its composer had any reason to expect. Already it was bidding fair to rival the Alan Overture and Mr. Barrett began to carry his nose tilted at an angle higher than ever, as if in imagination he already scented the fresh laurels ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... must be the essence of every drama. This continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose! Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the situation ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... error to explain the superiority of the great French moralists by supposing in them a fancy and imagination too defective for poetic art. It was the circumstances of the national literature during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which made Vauvenargues for instance a composer of aphorisms, rather than a moral poet like Pope. Let us remember some of his own most discriminating words. 'Who has more imagination,' he asks, 'than Bossuet, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, all of them great philosophers? Who more judgment and wisdom than Racine, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... equilibrium will obtain in the physical sphere, which will then itself pass away. In addition to his philosophical work, Azais studied music under his father, Pierre Hyacinthe Azais (1743-1796), professor of music at Soreze and Toulouse, and composer of sacred music in the style of Gossec. He wrote for the Revue musicale a series of articles entitled Acoustique fondamentale (1831), containing an ingenious, but now exploded, theory of the vibration of the air. His other works are: ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... air and the tone of the voice are exquisitely harmonious, though we regard not one word of what we hear, yet the power of the melody is so busy in the heart, that we naturally annex ideas to it of our own creation, and, in some sort, become ourselves the poet to the composer; and what poet is so dull as not to be charmed with the child of his own fancy? So that there is even a kind of language in agreeable sounds, which, like the aspect of beauty, without words, speaks and plays with the imagination. While this taste, therefore, is so naturally prevalent, I doubt, to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... did the part of Cenerentola and her sisters, were all handsome, but she who did Cenerentola surpassed them all; she was a perfect beauty and a grace. I think the music of this opera would please the public taste in England. Rossini seems to have banished every other musical composer from the stage. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... house to this on the eastern side was occupied for many years by the artistic family of the Lawsons. Thomas Attwood, a pupil of Mozart and himself a great composer, died there in 1838. The house had formerly a magnificent garden, to the mulberries of which Hazlitt makes allusion in one of his essays. No. 18 was the home of the famous Don Saltero's museum. This man, correctly Salter, was a servant of Sir ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... composer of the "Messiah," George Frederick Handel, was born at Halle, Germany, Feb. 23, 1685. He sang before he could talk plainly. His father, a physician, was alarmed, for he had a poor opinion of music and musicians. As the child grew, nature asserted that he would ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... were 'sentimentally inclined' when he exacted it of me, but we agreed not to play that piece for other people, and I doubt if he finds that promise any easier to break than I do, for he would not care to let others see his emotion. I have often wondered what was in the heart of the composer, for it touches my heart like no other piece of music has power to do. I fear I have not made it very plain to you, dear, but I wish you ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... perverting and misrepresenting Facts to be thought to deserve what she now enjoys: for though we do not imagine her the Author of the Narrative itself, yet we must suppose the Instructions were given by her, as well as the Reward, to the Composer. Who that is, though you so earnestly require of me, I shall leave you to guess from that Ciceronian Eloquence, with which the Work abounds; and that excellent Knack of making every Character amiable, which he lays his ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber
... specially fond of[1]—Chopin, and Mozart. He heard Gounod's Faust whilst he was in Paris, and confesses to having been quite overcome with the beauty of the music. 'I couldn't bear it,' he says, in one of his letters, 'and gave in completely. The composer must be a very remarkable man indeed.' At the same time he became acquainted with Offenbach's music, and heard Orphee aux enfers. This was in February, 1863. Here also he made the acquaintance of Auber, 'a stolid little elderly man, rather petulant ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... that look for him he shall appear the second time." That expectation of the speedy second coming of the Messiah which haunted the early Christians, therefore, unquestionably occupied the mind of the composer of the Epistle ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... in 1842, was the residence of the late Mr. George Herbert Rodwell, a favourite musical and dramatic composer, who ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... compliments with a deprecating air; but modesty did not prevent him from going from group to group for his meed of praise; and when there was no more to be said about the singer, he returned to the subject of the song, discussing its difficulties or extolling the composer. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... completed. After they had each copied out their respective verses, they handed them to Ying Ch'un, who took a separate sheet of snow-white fancy paper, and transcribed them together, affixing distinctly under each stanza the style of the composer. Li Wan and her assistants then began to read, starting from the first on the list, the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the course of this spring that she made the acquaintance of M. de Lamennais, introduced to her by their common friend, the composer, Franz Liszt. The famous author of the Paroles d'un Croyant had virtually severed himself from the Church of Rome by his recent publication of this little volume, pronounced by the Pope, "small in size, immense in ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... ecclesiastic is drawn upon for the basic characteristics of the character In the second version of "Evelyn Innes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, at least in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divest his composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Ireland in "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes," but "The Untilled Field," short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublin and gathered together in 1903, are wholly concerned with ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged with autumnal melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and, like all the men of his time and group, produced too much. Yet his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political satire, such as the two series ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... unfortunately only printed in parts. As a connecting link between the Gabrielis and Corelli, and more particularly as a forerunner of Kuhnau, Becker is of immense importance. We are concerned with the clavier sonata, otherwise we should certainly devote more space to this composer. We have been able to trace back sonatas by German composers to Becker (1668), and by Italian composers to Legrenzi (1655); those of Gabrieli and Banchieri, as short pieces, not a group of movements, are not taken into account. Now, ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... earlier courses. A graduate school which admits music will naturally do so on a vocational basis, and the question is not of the aim to be sought, but the much easier one of the means of its attainment, since there is no more of a puzzle in teaching an embryo composer or music teacher than there is in teaching an incipient ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Allessandro Scarlatti was then current and universally popular in Italy. This composer was particularly famous for the excellence of his recitative; and his general merit may be judged of by the fact, that he is placed by Arteaga, in his work on the revolutions of the musical drama in Italy, among the early authors belonging ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... solemn and intricate dances, that might have appeared abundantly significant, if expounded by impassioned music. But that music of Mendelssohn!—like it I cannot. Say not that Mendelssohn is a great composer. He is so. But here he was voluntarily abandoning the resources of his own genius, and the support of his divine art, in quest of a chimera: that is, in quest of a thing called Greek music, which for us ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... of music were invaded by the dispute between the adherents of the King and the adherents of the prince. The King and Queen were supporters {51} of Handel, the prince was against the great composer. The prince in the first instance declared against Handel because his sister Anne, the Princess of Orange, was one of Handel's worshippers, therefore a great number of the nobility who sided with the prince set up, or at least supported, a rival opera-house to that ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... young fellow's face brightened gaily. He stepped back a little way, leaned against a linden, and sang, in the drawling tone peculiar to the west of France, the following Breton ditty, published by Bruguiere, a composer to whom we are indebted for many charming melodies. In Brittany, the young villagers sing this song to all newly-married couples ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... sonorous voice echoed over the cemetery as he was approaching the end of his discourse. "The six feet of earth" was repeated again and again, like the refrain upon which a good composer will hang a whole symphony; and each time it seemed to make a deeper impression. The account in the evening papers might perhaps be slightly exaggerated, when it said that not an eye was dry; but certain is it that many wept, and not only women, but men also. Some even of the ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... should have been written, in order that the greatest might be produced. The same is true of the drama. Thousands and thousands prepared the way for the supreme dramatist, as millions prepared the way for the supreme composer. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... and Switzerland were written during the two years with which he prefaced his quarter-century of labor as composer, director, and virtuoso. They relate much to Italian painting, the music of Passion Week, Swiss scenery, his stay with Goethe, and his brilliant reception in England on his return. They disclose a youth of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... unrighteous judge, no tyrant, but Nature, who brought thee hither; as when a player leaves the stage at the bidding of the conductor who hired him. Sayest thou, 'I have not played five acts'? True! but in [211] human life, three acts only make sometimes an entire play. That is the composer's business, not thine. Withdraw thyself with a good will; for that too hath, perchance, a good will which ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... at the piano fingered a chord tentatively, then struck into a popular song, an appealing little melody, the words a lyric set to music by a composer ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... appears must rather injure than improve the belle nature of the original. Still I wish it to be published, as coming from my hand; because it gives me an opportunity of expressing, in some degree, my unqualified admiration of its composer. Well may he be called THE POET AND HISTORIAN OF THE NEW WORLD. To justify this appellation, one has only to look at Madoc and the History of Brazil. I have heard, from a friend, of a rumor that Southey is ill; and, as it ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... memory, and 'tis only when he states his facts that you admire the flights of his imagination." But the thought was too good to be thus wasted on the desert air of a common-place book. So, forth it came, at the expense of Kelly, who, having been a composer of music, became a wine-merchant. "You will," said the ready wit, "import your music and compose your wine." Nor was this service exacted from the old idea thought sufficient; so, in the House of Commons, an easy and, apparently, off-hand parenthesis was thus filled ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... (?1774-1856), the great tenor and the composer of "The Death of Nelson." Lamb praised him again in his Elia essay "Imperfect Sympathies," and later wrote an amusing article on Braham's recantation of Hebraism (see "The Religion of Actors," Vol. I.). "Kais," composed ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Institution or Induction of Ministers into parishes or churches, set forth in our Book of Common Prayer, was compiled by him. He was a man of much learning, ardent temperament, and quick impulses. He possessed singular versatility of talents, was a composer of church music, and a constructor of church organs. He was a pioneer in our country in chanting, and did us good service in overcoming or diminishing the popular love for a Puritan style of ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... was the last composer who had distinguished between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of Wagner's music is the identification ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... exposure, cover them quickly up with a quantity of obscure classical quotations, a few familiar allusions to an unknown period of history, and a half-destroyed fresco by an early master, varied every now and then with a reference to the fugues or toccatas of a quite-forgotten composer. ...
— Every Man His Own Poet - Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book • Newdigate Prizeman
... phrase. concord, harmony; emmeleia[obs3]; unison, unisonance[obs3]; chime, homophony; euphony, euphonism[obs3]; tonality; consonance; consent; part. [Science of harmony] harmony, harmonics; thorough-bass, fundamental- bass; counterpoint; faburden[obs3]. piece of music &c. 415[Fr]; composer, harmonist[obs3], contrapuntist (musician) 416. V. be harmonious &c. adj.; harmonize, chime, symphonize[obs3], transpose; put in tune, tune, accord, string. Adj. harmonious, harmonical[obs3]; in concord &c. n., in tune, in concert; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Richard Wagner, the great composer, the Bishop of Mayence, and noblemen, generals, and scholars without number were also pressed into the service, but in vain. The treachery of intimate friends more than counterbalanced all that could be achieved by well-meaning strangers. If Helen is to be believed—and the charge is not ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... sketches, which can be read in a few moments' time, are intended to give the reader as clear as possible an outline of the great dramatist-composer's work. ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... profuse, the Other [55]over-saving, and the Third (like himself) give it no Relish at all: It may be too sharp, if it exceed a grateful Acid; too Insulse and flat, if the Profusion be extream. From all which it appears, that a Wise-Man is the proper Composer of an excellent Sallet, and how many Transcendences belong to an accomplish'd Sallet-Dresser, so as to emerge an exact Critic indeed, He should be skill'd in the Degrees, Terms, and various Species of Tastes, according to the Scheme set us down in the Tables of the Learned [56]Dr. ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... the embroidered edges of the dress, is of great value in opposing and making more manifest the severe and grave outlines of the whole figure, whose impressiveness is also partly increased by the rise of the mountain just above it, like a tent. A vulgar composer would have moved this peak to the right or left, ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... proved to contain three carrots and two onions, carefully washed, and shining; they were the kindly fruits of the earth, and of the prophet's own labor, and my old auntie was deeply touched, because it appeared that this visitor was a seer, the sole composer of a mighty tome which is to be found in the public library, and is ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... being silly in the attempt to be original, and a few others who still believe that all the people can stand in the way of home-grown products is a ballad or a Te Deum. But what we want is an English composer with a soul. I'm getting quite sick of heads. They are bearable in literature. But when it comes to music, one's ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a celebrated composer, was appointed master of the chapel to Louis XII. of France, who promised him a benefice, but contrary to his usual custom, forgot him. Josquin, after suffering great inconvenience from the shortness of his majesty's memory, ventured, by a singular expedient, publicly to remind him ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... man gave a careless friendliness to his faded little aunt, and spent long hours with his dreams, creative and subjective, in her garden. For the most part they were dreams of unheard melodies, for Mark Faraday was a composer. So little of his life had been spent in his own country that outside the garden he felt less at home in America than in Florence or Vienna. Yet place mattered little to him. An artist and a creator, his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... you are listening to something which belonged originally to Beale Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. The original "Memphis Blues," so far as it can be credited to a composer, must be credited to Mr. W. C. Handy, a colored musician ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... rest and change. Had he done so, the collapse which was imminent might have been averted. But he took no rest though in the spring of 1905 he began to show signs of nervous breakdown. The following summer was spent, as usual, in Peterboro but it seemed to bring no relief to the exhausted composer. In the fall of that year his ailment appeared worse. Although he seemed perfectly well in body, his mind gradually became like that of a child. The writer was privileged to see him on one occasion, and retains an ineffaceable memory of ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... tears roll down his cheeks. Behold yonder tall and scarred veteran, an old soldier of Napoleon, capitulating now before the witchery of genius and wit. Here the noble Russian exile forgets his sorrows in those smiles that, unlike the aurora, warm while they dazzle. And our celebrated composer is discomposed easily by alert and nimble-footed mischief. And our professor of Greek and Hebrew roots is rooted to the ground with astonishment at finding himself put through all the moods and tenses of fun in a twinkling. Ah, culpable sirens, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... conducted her, disguised as Flora, in an ornamented barge, all festooned with garlands, and illuminated with coloured lamps. It was a truly fairy scene, and the Dame Lebrun did not at that time look on the composer of the spectacle as a malignant cobold, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... us hear what Berlin has to say about the inseparable quality of words and music: "The song writer who writes both words and music, has the advantage over the lyric writer who must fit his words to somebody else's music and the composer who must make his music fit someone else's words. Latitude—the mother of novelty—is denied them, and in consequence both lyrics and melody suffer. Since I write both words and music, I can compose them together ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... a young composer was sitting in a garden. All around bloomed beautiful roses, and through the gentle evening air the swallows flitted, twittering cheerily. The young composer neither saw the roses nor heard the evening music of the swallows; his heart was full of sadness and his eyes were bent wearily ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... us all that is perplexing. What we understand is good and loving. Let us be sure that what we do not yet understand is good and loving too. The web is of one texture throughout. The least educated ear can catch the music of the simpler melodies which run through the Great Composer's work. We shall one day be able to appreciate the yet fuller music of the more recondite parts, which to us at present seem only jangling and discord. It is not His melody but our ears that are at fault. But we may well accept the obscurity ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... gravity as he said these things, turning first to one and then to the other. Mr. John Holt's eyes were keen and observant; and one swift glance took in the knowledge of the composer's hungry pallor, his threadbare dress, the bare and poverty-stricken ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... greatest living pianists. All have had the revision of the artists in person before publication was undertaken. In order to indicate how carefully and willingly this was done by the pianists it is interesting to note the case of the great Russian composer-virtuoso Rachmaninoff. The original conference was conducted in German and in French. The material was arranged in manuscript form in English. M. Rachmaninoff then requested a second conference. In the mean time he had ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... melodies. We think this a pretty fair statement of the facts in the case. Mr. Dwight, however, says: 'Not even Mozart in 'Don Juan' had so great a subject;' and in this connection we feel compelled to offer a few remarks. We think every great composer owes it to his own God-gift, and to the human beings whom he is to influence, not to select intrinsically repulsive subjects, and such have we found both 'Don Juan' and 'Faust.' Now we are not morbidly fastidious, and we well know the freedom that must be accorded to art, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... almost all it can define, or even suggest. Certain music is called "characteristic"—anvil choruses, for example, where hammers or triangles or tin whistles are used, but that is not music in its best estate, and musical purpose is best understood after a composer has labelled it, whether the ultra-artistic are ready ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... Hussar regiment quartered at Eisleben. It often played a certain piece which had just come out, and which was making a great sensation, I mean the 'Huntsmen's Chorus' out of the Freischutz, that had been recently performed at the Opera in Berlin. My uncle and brother asked me eagerly about its composer, Weber, whom I must have seen at my parents' house in Dresden, when he was conductor of the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... "What themes are in common music, shapes are in this music. The composer does not find his theme by picking out single notes; but the whole theme flashes into his mind by inspiration. So it must be with shapes. When I start playing, if I am worth anything, the undivided ideas will pass from my unconscious mind to this ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... university and several other public buildings. A chain of beautiful promenades encircles the city on the site of its old fortifications. Following their course through walks shaded by large trees and bordered with flowering shrubs, I passed a small but chaste monument to Sebastian Bach, the composer, which was erected almost entirely at the private cost of Mendelssohn, and stands opposite the building in which Bach once directed the choirs. As I was standing beside it a glorious choral swelled by a hundred voices came through the open windows like a tribute ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... employed the Highland tour in hearing all he could, that had any bearing on his now absorbing pursuit, and in collecting materials that might promote it. With this view, when on his way from Taymouth to Blair, he had turned aside to visit the famous fiddler and composer of Scotch tunes, Neil Gow, at his house, which is still pointed out, at Inver, on the Braan water, opposite the grounds of Dunkeld. This is the entry about him in Burns's diary:—"Neil Gow plays—a short, stout-built, honest Highland figure, with his grey hair shed on (p. 074) ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... forgotten scene. The grand old church was crowded to the last inch of space, although admission was by ticket. Facing the chancel were the thirty famous women singers of Goeteborg, their cantor a woman, and the noted woman organist and composer, Elfrida Andree, who composed the music for the occasion. In the center of all was the little black-robed minister. It was said by many to be the most wonderful sermon of her life and after the service was over the pastor, with tears rolling ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... Good as was their quality, and witty as was their form,—his only independent volume was an almost incredibly witty little book of charades in verse—they were too slight in bulk for commemoration; and it was only as a musical composer that he touched on any really public function. With so many of his compositions sounding in your ears, it would be out of place, even were I qualified, to attempt to characterize Mr. Boott's musical genius. Let it speak for itself. I prefer to speak of the man and friend ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... pushed a dish of chocolates in front of his youngest daughter to keep her quiet, and then plunged like a hero into the tendencies of modern music, which he deplored. He asked my opinion of Richard Strauss, a composer of whom he was profoundly ignorant. Scarlatti and Corelli tided us over dessert, and Purcell floated us tenderly into the drawing-room and coffee. After coffee the Canon took me into the library (he ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... BALFOUR, who has little time for golf nowadays, finds his most refreshing recreation in reading the speeches of Lord NORTHCLIFFE, co-ordinating them with those of BURKE and PERICLES, and setting them to music in the style of HANDEL, his favourite composer. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... careful composer. He allows himself many liberties, which betray a want of respect for his reader. For instance, he is too fond of inversions; i.e. he often places the verb before the substantive, and the accusative before the verb. W. Scott quoted, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Beethoven had for a maternal grandmother an excellent musician. The mother of Mozart gave the first lessons to her son. A crowd of composers have descended from John Sebastian Bach, who long stood unrivaled as a performer on the organ, and composer for that instrument. It may be remarked here, that it is almost invariably true that the ability or inability to acquire a knowledge of music is derived from the ancestry. Parents who cannot turn a tune or tell one note from another, bring forth children equally unmoved 'with ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... was singularly suited to the great, bull voice of its composer, born to the red and become Captain Stransky in the red business of war. It was he who led the thunder of its verses not far from where Peterkin led the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... coat all the years I knew him. It seemed to have been blue to begin with, but when it had got torn Billy had patched it with anything that was handy, from green cloth to red flannel. He called it his Joseph's coat of many colours. Billy was a poet and a musical composer. He could not read a word, but he would rather have died than confess his ignorance. He kept books and newspapers always about him, and when he read out of them, he usually held them upside down. If any one remarked on that, he said he could read them any way up—that was where his scholarship ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... had been five and forty, or by'r lady, fifty, the widow of a tailor, herself wondrous keen after money, and stung very nigh to madness by the preposterous balance due (as per ledger), and the inexhaustible and ingenious dodges executed by the insolvent Sir Jaufry, the composer of that chivalric romance might have shrunk from the happy winding-up as bordering ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Besides, by craning her neck a little to avoid the hat of the rather strikingly dressed young woman in front of her, she could, at least, see the stage. The programme which she held in one hand announced that Miss Agatha Ismay would sing a certain aria from a great composer's oratorio, and she leaned further forward in her chair when a girl of about her own age, which was twenty-four, slowly advanced to ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... same sweet history of the inglenook which is the basis of the Bluebeard libretto. Strauss's symphony is worked out along more tranquil lines, to be sure, but it is only the history of a single day of married life and a day arbitrarily chosen by the composer. It is conceivable that there may have ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... going—some are coming. Presently I see an opening in the bushes on my left; the path leads me to a clump of evergreens. I follow it, and come suddenly on the great composer's grave. All about the green square mound the trees are thick—laurel, fir, and yew. The shades fall funereally across the immense gray granite slab; but over the dark foliage the sky is bright blue, and straight in front of me, above the low bushes, I can see the bow-windows ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... have the power to make a great lady suffer. For a great lady I knew Ysolinde to be even then, when her father seemed to be no more in the city of Thorn than Master Gerard, the fount and treasure-house of law and composer-general ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Billings, First New England composer, organizer of singing societies, etc. Billings ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... successor to Captain Frank Johnson, of Philadelphia, is now one of the most distinguished musicians in the country. Mr. Anderson is an artist professionally and practically, mastering various instruments, a composer of music, and a gentleman of fine accomplishments in other respects. His musical fame will grow with his age, which one day must place him in the front ranks of his profession, among the master ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... of Privy-Councillor Oesterreich and others, there was a pleasant boy named Victor Rubens, whose parents were likewise friends of my mother. In the hospitable house of this agreeable family I had heard the composer Vieuxtemps play the violin when I was nine years old. I went home fairly enraptured, and begged my mother to let me take lessons. My wish was fulfilled, and for many years I exerted myself zealously, without any result, to accomplish something ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... been played the leader lost his self-consciousness and forgot his surroundings. He began to feel the music, to compose it again, and the mechanism of the conductor was lost in the inspiration of the composer. It was a beautiful movement marked andante sostenuto—pathos itself, and Von Barwig drew from his men their very souls, forcing them in turn to draw out of their strings all the suffering he had been going through for the past few days. Then a curious psychic phenomenon took place. Von Barwig ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... composer who has just played his newly written revue masterpiece)—"Yes, I've always liked that little thing. Now play one of your ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... cry of those four notes; and one listens, one trembles, one feels that they were to come before they are there, and when they have come, one can but shake and know their force." He stopped and took his cigarette from between his lips. "Mon Dieu," he cried violently, "of what was the composer thinking when he beat out those bars? When you shall play them you shall take only your forefinger and draw all your strength within it, and when the notes shriek in pain you shall have one secret of passion there ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... appears as chief owner in many of them; and it seems clear that the spoils which he gathered from the sea formed the basis of a goodly heritage upon dry land. He was an intimate friend of a certain Parsi millionaire, whom the composer of the ballad has supposed to be Sir Jamserji Jeejeebhoy, but who was more probably a member of the great family of Wadia,—the original ship-builders and dock-masters ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... Italian rhymes are better finished than his French; and indeed the facility of composing in that most poetical of all languages must be obvious: but, as a composer in Italian, he and all other Englishmen are much inferior to Mr. Mathias. It is very perceptible in many of Mr. S.'s smaller pieces that he has suffered his English versification to be vitiated with Italian 'concetti'; and we should have been better pleased with his compositions ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... The world is now indebted to Jonas for some of its best church music. As a composer and teacher he is "great." Those who are as fortunate as the writer of this sketch in having him as a teacher to their children can truly say they know a ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... story. Who can read, for example, the inimitable legend of the blind piper in 'Redgauntlet' without seeing that it bears all the marks of long elaboration as clearly as one of those discourses of Whitfield, which, by constant repetition, became marvels of dramatic art? He was an impromptu composer, in the sense that when his anecdotes once reached paper, they flowed rapidly, and were little corrected; but the correction must have been substantially done in many cases long before they appeared in the state ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... a composer that her brilliant talents stand preeminent. MOZART, BEETHOVEN, and a host of others excelled in this respect, but they all lack that exquisite pathos and graceful rhetoric which so distinguished this queen of literature. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... thoughts form, who had indeed started her thinking of the inadequacy of her life. The brother, a studious, quiet man, worked as a chemist in a manufacturing plant somewhere at the edge of town. He was a musician and wanted to become a composer. One evening during the winter his sister Kate had brought Clara to the apartment where the two lived, and the three had become friends. Clara had learned something there that she did not yet understand and never did ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... people have been developing a tenderness and pathos that really grips one's heart. The music was composed by a man by the name of Dedler, about one hundred years ago, and while it gives expression to the composer's tender heart, yet experts say that it reminds them of Hayden and Mozart. The paintings in the building are those of great masters. It took an entire year to paint the scenery for the play in 1910, but they could not afford to spend so much upon it in 1922. The curtains and costumes ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... musical composer, has just published a pleasant volume of "Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron," with a new edition of the celebrated "Hebrew Melodies," and some never before published, of which the following are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 373, Supplementary Number • Various
... and fear, and self-distrust, and self-disapprobation. They who have known these feelings (and who is there so happy as not to have known some of them?) will understand why Alfieri became powerless, and Froissart dull; and why even needle-work, the most effectual sedative, that grand soother and composer of woman's distress, fails to comfort me to-day. I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do. I fancy that exercise or exertion of any kind, is the true specific for nervousness. 'Fling but a stone, the giant dies.' I will go to ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... "The Spanish composer? Oh, rather! He's coming over about his new opera. He's all right. At least, I bear him rather, ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... visited the Eiffel Tower at the invitation of Eiffel. We went to the top, where there was an extension and a small place in which was Eiffel's private office. In this was a piano. When my wife and I arrived at the top, we found that Gounod, the composer, was there. We stayed a couple of hours, and Gounod sang and played for us. We spent a day at Meudon, an old palace given by the government to Jansen, the astronomer. He occupied three rooms, and there were 300. He had the grand dining-room for his laboratory. He showed me a gyroscope he had ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... German musicians insisted that Wagner was not a composer. They declared that he produced only a succession of discordant noises. I account for this by the fact that the music of Wagner was not German. His countrymen could not understand it. They had to be educated. There was ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... triangular campaign of the three cities. And here we may allude, en passant, to the prospect of one novelty that ought to interest our opera-lovers who are weary of the usual hackneyed repertoire. Our townsman, Mr. L. H. Southard, the composer of "The Scarlet Letter," has also written an Italian opera, on an Oriental subject, with the title "Omano," the libretto by Signor Manetta, founded on Beckford's "Vathek." A private or subscription concert will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... way mere tone-color is not the substance of a musical composition. Beethoven's Eighth Symphony is just as great a work, in all its essentials, in a four-hand piano arrangement as in the original score. Every harmonic and melodic idea of the composer is there; one can trace just as clearly the subtle processes of his mind; every step in the working out of the materials is just as plain. True enough, there are orchestral compositions of which this cannot be reasonably said; their color is so much more important than their ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... short," we say, so soon as we can be heard above the applause. Is Miss Screecher quite sure that was the whole of it? Or has she been playing tricks upon us, the naughty lady, defrauding us of a verse? Miss Screecher assures us that the fault is the composer's. But she knows another. At this hint, our faces lighten again with ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... his voice, true and resonant almost to the last. I have heard him say, "Did you never observe how an Italian organ-grinder will sometimes put in a few notes of his own in such perfect keeping with the air which he was grinding?" He was not a great, but he was a good composer. Some of his songs have been printed, and many still remain in manuscript. Then what pleasant talk I have had with him about the singers of our early years; never forgetting to speak of Mrs. Frere of Downing, as the most perfect private singer we had ever heard. And so indeed she was. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... above all things an actor: that is his first aim, in the pursuit of which (as I have observed) he resembles the orator, and especially the composer of 'declamations,' whose success, as the pantomime knows, depends like his own upon verisimilitude, upon the adaptation of language to character: prince or tyrannicide, pauper or farmer, each must be shown with the peculiarities ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... was provided by Flaccus, slave of Claudius. The composer himself was probably the instrumentalist. Four kinds of flutes are mentioned as used by him: tibiae pares, impares, sarranae, and duae dextrae (see note p. 45). The scene of all the plays is ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... A landscape painter would not make a primary study of Angelo's anatomical drawings; a composer of lyric forms of music would not study Sousa's marches; nor would a person writing a story look for much assistance in the arguments of Burke. The most direct benefit is derived from studying the very thing one wishes to know ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... roofed with an awning of white silk which bore the royal arms, flares were burning up to the topmost cornice of the round walls. A temporary altar decorated in white and gold was ablaze with candles, and the choir, conducted by a fashionable composer of opera, were in a golden cage. The King and Queen and royal princes sat in chairs under a velvet canopy, and there were tribunes for cabinet ministers, senators, deputies, and foreign ambassadors. Religion was necessary to all state functions, and the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... into the melody. It was a better performance than the last. Agatha's playing was much less correct, but as she went on she forgot herself, and she put something into the accompaniment which Mrs. Harrington had left out. It was not time, neither was it a stricter attention to the composer's instructions. It was ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... analogy from the production of music in which purely physical factors are concerned; the laws of harmonics account for all; but back of all is something that is not mechanical and chemical—there is the mind of the composer, and the performers, and the auditors, and something that takes cognizance of the whole effect. A complete human philosophy cannot be built upon physical science alone. He thinks the evolution of life from inert matter is of ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... connecting them—of disposing them into such an arrangement as that they can be connected—of clothing them in words—and many more acts of the mind: both analytic and synthetic. All that is necessary is—to determine for the young composer his choice of matter: require him therefore to narrate an interesting story which he has formerly read; to rehearse the most interesting particulars of a day's excursion: in the case of more advanced students, let them read one of the English ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... of Scriabin, telegraphed the news of the composer's death to a friend in England. He stated that Scriabin died of the disease of the lip from which he was suffering when in England last year, and that he had just finished the "wonderful poetical text" of the prologue to his "Mystery." ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... leaped suddenly into the rag-time without whose accompaniment it was impossible, anywhere in the civilized world, to dine correctly. That rag-time, committed, I suppose, originally by some well-intentioned if banal composer in the privacy of his study one night, had spread over the whole universe of restaurants like a pest, to the exasperation of the sensitive, but evidently to the joy of correct diners. Joy shone ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... been known as an excellent composer of sonnets and other short pieces. But "In Memoriam: A.H." lifts him to a position among our living poets to which he had hardly a pretension. In a long irregular threnody or funeral ode, the great technical difficulty is to support lyrical emotion throughout. No form of verse is ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Swedish and Saxon dynasties, and through Jesuit instrumentality, religious liberty and national independence were lost, and Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. As a race the Poles boast such names as Copernicus the astronomer, Kosciusko the patriot warrior, and Chopin the composer."[66] ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... worked upon the collection of leaves a little while every day. They divided the duty, giving each one a share. Stuyvesant pressed the leaves and gummed them to their places in the book. Phonny, who was a pretty good composer, composed the descriptions, and afterward Stuyvesant would copy them upon the pieces of paper which were to be pasted into the book. Stuyvesant used to go out to the barn or the yard, to get all the information which Beechnut could give him in respect ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott
... hours, we do not possess intuitively more than, at the most, certain traits of his physiognomy, which enable us to distinguish him from others. The illusion is less easy as regards musical expression; because it would seem strange to everyone to say that the composer had added or attached notes to the motive, which is already in the mind of him who is not the composer. As if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony were not his own intuition and his own intuition the Ninth Symphony. Thus, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... my meaning plainer I will use an illustration. Take an author at his writing, a painter at his canvas, a composer listening to the melodies that dawn upon his glad imagination; let any one of these workers pass his daily hours by a wide window looking on a busy street. The power of the animating life blinds sight and hearing alike, and the great traffic of the city goes ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... an unintellectual occupation, and the usual auditor of his lays was his younger brother Matthew, who for some years was his companion in the workshop. The acquaintance of Robert Archibald Smith, the celebrated musical composer, which he was now fortunate in forming, was the means of stimulating his Muse to higher efforts and of awakening his ambition. Smith was at this period resident in Paisley; and along with one Ross, a teacher of music from Aberdeen, he set several of Tannahill's best ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various |
