I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him … the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope”.
–President John F. Kennedy, Remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963
There’s always so much more to be done in music. It’s so vast. And that’s why I’m always trying to develop, to find new and better ways of saying things musically.
–Charlie Parker in an interview with Nat Hentoff published in the January 1953 issue of Down Beat
There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at, and always there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds, so we can really see more and more clearly what we are. But to do that, at each stage, we have to keep cleaning the mirror.
–John Coltrane as quoted in Down Beat, August 27, 1964, p. 13
Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn’t about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.
–Miles Davis in Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe. Miles, the Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989, p. 394
Art demands of us that we shall not stand still.
–Ludwig van Beethoven (1826), as quoted in Elliot Forbes, ed. Thayer’s Life of Beethoven. Vol. II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964, p. 982.
… it exemplifies the incredibly on-going nature of his [Beethoven’s] music, that molecular growth-process of his, whereby motives, or parts of motives, can become attached or detached in infinite numbers of ways by constant repositioning, conjoining, and embedding. This process is so intense and diversified that even so apparently destructive an activity as fragmentation contributes profusely to the growth of this living organism.
–Leonard Bernstein. The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976, p. 165.
More simply, the music stays alive by inventive continuation … for so long as there are new possibilities of motion and metamorphosis there can be no ceasing to be…The beauty of Mozart’s music is in its refusal to remain quiescent until it has exhausted all its possibilities, or at least until it has shown, by example, that those possibilities are manifold and endless.
-Maynard Solomon. Mozart: A Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, pgs. 377, 378.
Picasso’s portraiture casts the very concept of identity into doubt; it is no longer fixed, but mutable. Caught in the flux of the artist’s passion for metamorphosis, the images and identities of his real-life subjects continuously dissolve and re-form.[1] Human anatomy becomes “the raw material” for “an endless flow of metamorphoses.” [2]
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
–Martha Graham, as quoted in Agnes De Mille. Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. New York: Random House, 1991, p. 264
For all of us, but particularly for a dancer with his intensification of life and his body, there is a blood memory that can speak to us. Each of us from our mother and father has received their blood and through their parents and their parents’ parents and backward into time. We carry thousands of years of that blood and its memory. How else to explain those instinctive gestures and thoughts that come to us, with little preparation or expectation. They come perhaps from some deep memory of a time when the world was chaotic, when, as the Bible says, the world was nothing. And then, as if some door opened slightly, there was light. It revealed certain wonderful things. It revealed terrifying things. But it was light…You don’t build on security. You risk. Everything is a risk. You use every part of anything you remember as part of the present, the now.
–Martha Graham. Blood Memory: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1991, pgs. 9-10, 255-256
Lamentation by Martha Graham
I dwell in possibility.
–Emily Dickinson
Music is limitless.
–Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington. Music is My Mistress. New York: Da Capo Press, 1973, p. 465
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- William Rubin, ed. Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1996, p. 13.
- H.W. Janson, with Dora Jane Janson. History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965, p. 524.
