Music Notes

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If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. (Documented in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, ed. Alice Calaprice, p.237.)

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I get most joy in life out of my violin. (The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, p.237.)

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To know the cause why music was ordain'd!

Was it not to refresh the mind of man

After his studies or his usual pain? 

    (Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act III, Scene 1.)

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In sweet music is such art,

Killing care and grief of heart....

    (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act III, Scene 1.)

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Mathematics is music for the mind;

Music is mathematics for the soul.

It is no accident that medieval scholars in organizing their curriculum placed music along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy in the quadrivium. (Donald E. Hall, Musical Acoustics, Brooks/Cole Publishing, p.444.)

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Music is universal, crosses cultural, historical, and intellectual boundaries, and is grounded in mathematics. Mathematics is also universal, crosses cultural, historical, and intellectual boundaries, and is reflected in music. The interconnectedness of math and music pulsates and sings with a rhythm and harmony of its own. (Trudi Hammel Garland and Charity Vaughan Kahn, eds., Math and Music: Harmonious Connections, p.5.)

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Mozart is universal. One marvels again and again how everything comes to expression in him: heaven and earth, nature and man, comedy and tragedy, passion in all its forms and the most profound inner peace, the Virgin Mary and the demons, the church mass, the curious solemnity of the Freemasons and the dance hall, ignorant and sophisticated people, cowards and heroes (genuine or bogus), the faithful and the faithless, aristocrats and peasants, Papageno and Sarastro. And he seems to concern himself with each of these in turn not only partially but fully; rain and sunshine fall on all. This is reflected, I think, in the utterly lovely but always, it seems, effortless and inevitable way in which he shapes and arranges the relationship among human voices, or in the concertos between the reigning solo instrument and the accompanying strings and wind instruments—which never merely accompany. Can one ever listen enough to what happens in a Mozart orchestra, how the components are introduced, unexpected but always with perfect timing in their own height or depth and tone color? It is as though in a small segment the whole universe bursts into song because evidently the man Mozart has apprehended the cosmos and now, functioning only as a medium, brings it into song! (Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Eerdmans Publishing, pp.34–5.)

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Mozart's music is not, in contrast to that of Bach, a message, and not, in contrast to that of Beethoven, a personal confession. He does not reveal in his music any doctrine and certainly not himself.... Mozart does not wish to say anything: he just sings and sounds. (Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, p.37.)

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Of Mozart's more than sixty pieces of church music, one need think only of the C Minor Mass, the Credo Mass or the Coronation Mass, and also of the Ave verum corpus from the end of his life, which in the intense expressiveness of its melody and chromatic harmony can show how music itself can be worship. (Hans Küng, Mozart: Traces of Transcendence, Eerdmans Publishing, p.31.)

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The mysteries of Ave verum corpus are embodied in subtle gestures.... Mozart stages the great Christian mystery of corporeal pain and spiritual redemption as a ravishing, yet quietly personal, revelation. Within the world of Ave verum corpus, the word of God is a whisper in your ear, a rustle in your blood, a breath. (Scott Burnham, Mozart's Grace, Princeton University Press, p.75.)

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Whoever has discovered Mozart even to a small degree and then tries to speak about him falls quickly into what seems rapturous stammering. (Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, p.27.)

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Claudio Abbado, conductor, to a young pianist preparing Mozart: "Keep it simple; don't make it beautiful." "But it is beautiful." "Yes: that's my point." (Documentation unknown.)

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Here [at the Opera] it was that Emmy found her delight, and was introduced for the first time to the wonders of Mozart and Cimarosa. The Major's musical taste has been before alluded to, and his performances on the flute commended. But perhaps the chief pleasure he had in the operas was in watching Emmy's rapture while listening to them. A new world of love and beauty broke upon her when she was introduced to those divine compositions: this lady had the keenest and finest sensibility, and how could she be indifferent when she heard Mozart? The tender parts of Don Juan awakened in her raptures so exquisite that she would ask herself when she went to say her prayers of a night, whether it was not wicked to feel so much delight? But the Major, whom she consulted upon this head, as her theological adviser (and who himself had a pious and reverent soul), said that, for his part, every beauty of art or nature made him thankful as well as happy; and that the pleasure to be had in listening to fine music, as in looking at the stars in the sky, or at a beautiful landscape or picture, was a benefit for which we might thank Heaven as sincerely as for any other worldly blessing. (William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, chapter 61.)

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The ear changes with the generations, and what is cacophony to me may well draw tears down the cheeks of my nephews and nieces; so I will confine myself to affirming that poetry which renounces the singing quality plucks its own wings. (Sir Edward Marsh, quoted in Musical America, January, 1991).

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Music is the art most nigh to tears and memory. (Attributed to Oscar Wilde.)

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Certain strains of music affect me so strangely; I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time, and if the effect would last, I might be capable of heroisms. (George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Bk.5, Ch.1— the character Philip speaking.)

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I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music. At other times one is conscious of carrying a weight. (Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Bk.6, Ch.3 — the character Maggie speaking.)

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There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. (Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Bk.6, Ch.7, the author's observation.)

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But Maggie, who had little more power of concealing the impressions made upon her than if she had been constructed of musical strings, felt her eyes getting larger with tears. (Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Bk.6, Ch.7.)

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There is nothing in the world more like prayer than music. (Source unknown.)

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Unto Thy word so tunèd let me be,
That in each part I may thereto agree.
They sing and play the songs which best Though lov'st,
Who do and say the things which Thou approv'st.

Teach me the strain that calmeth minds enraged,
And which from vain affections doth recall.
So to the choir where angels music make
I may aspire when I this life forsake.

    (Poem attributed to William Austin, 1587–1634.)

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                                      ...May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

    (George Eliot, "O May I Join the Choir Invisible")

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O God, whose voice is as the sound of many waters,
thou hast bidden us to worship thee with the sound of the trumpet,
with psaltery and harp, with stringed instruments and organs,
and to be glad in thee and to shout for joy:
Help us to contrive by all means to set forth thy most worthy praise,
that our art may be tuned to thy glory.

    (John Robert Walmsley Stott, alt., documentation unknown.)

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A painter paints pictures on canvas. Musicians paint their pictures on silence. (Leopold Stokowski, documentation unknown.)

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After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. (Aldous Huxley, "The Rest Is Silence," in Music at Night and Other Essays.)

Music’s ability to express the inexpressible was recognized by the greatest of all verbal artists. The man who wrote Othello and The Winter’s Tale was capable of uttering in words whatever words can possibly be made to signify. And yet...whenever something in the nature of a mystical emotion or intuition had to be communicated, Shakespeare regularly called upon music to help him to "put it across." (Ibid.)

When the inexpressible had to be expressed, Shakespeare laid down his pen and called for music. And if the music should also fail? Well, there was always silence to fall back on. For always, always and everywhere, the rest is silence. (Ibid.)

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Who hears music, feels solitude peopled at once. (Robert Browning, "A Transcript from Euripides.")

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When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present. (Alan Watts, documentation unknown.)

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No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them. (Alan Watts, documentation unknown.)

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From Einstein's dedication of the Wall of Fame at the 1938–39 World's Fair in New York: "To the Negro and his wonderful songs and choirs we are indebted for the finest contribution in the realm of art which America has so far given the world." (The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, pp.311–12.)

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In 1926 Einstein was invited to participate in the First International Congress for Sexual Research, to play one of the violin parts in a Brahms String Sextet. His answer: "Unfortunately I don't feel I'm in a position, on the strength of either my sexual or musical abilities, to accept your kind invitation." (The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, p.236.)

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Even if one loves to play
One's little fiddle night and day
It's not right to broadcast it
Lest the list'ners scoff at it.
If you scratch with all your might—
Which is certainly your right—
Then bring down the windowpane
So the neighbors don't complain.

    (A verse composed by Einstein and sent to his friend, the mathematician Emil Hilb, 1939; translated by Alice Calaprice, Ultimate Quotable Einstein, 466.)

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"Violins"

The violins have been gregarious
Right from the time of Stradivarius
And in the worst orchestral weather
They like to string along together
Producing tones, both high and deep,
From hair of horse on gut of sheep.
And yet to play the violin
One has to take it on the chin;
But violinists take a chance
Because they know it brings romance.
With shaking head and swaying hip
Thus handily the gypsies gyp—
Thus easily the fiddlers can
Bring life and love to any man—
And so we see, from this tirade,
Why Rome burned up when Nero played.

    (Laurence McKinney, People of Note, Crowell-Collier Publishing, 1940.)

Einstein can't be blamed for this one!

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A rare recording of Einstein playing his violin—the 2nd movement of Mozart's Sonata in B-flat major KV378—is at  https://bit.ly/3wQ1hOJ .

 

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