Reber Johnson a violinist also got off another one, after I'd played over the Second Violin Sonata for himthat harmless piece. 'After stuff like that'he said'if you consider that music, and like it, how can you like Brahms or any good music' That is a very common attitude among almost all the well known lilies. They take it i.e., that attitude for granteda kind of self-evident axiom, a settled-for-life matter, ipso facto, admitting of no argument. The classical is good for all time, the modern is bad for all timeso if you like one, you can't like the other. Describing the reaction of a typical professional musician to his, and other twentieth-century, compositions. 'Lilies' was one of Ives' names for most of the concert goers of his era, who expected all music to be conventional and pretty.
Quotes about brahms (14 Quotes)
There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
You look at Beethoven's sketch book and he's working things out, trying this, trying that. Mozart didn't do that. He simply wrote it out. Beethoven did not have the same abilities that Mozart had. And you know how much Beethoven means to us. When you listen to the Ninth Symphony, it's one of the greatest accomplishments of all mankind, artistically certainly. But he shuddered when he thought of the shadow Mozart cast over music and he felt pressure, just like Brahms felt the pressure Beethoven's Ninth put on symphonic writing.
One of the other things I like about the April program is it gives me a chance to talk some to the audience. In researching this, I found some interesting connections between these pieces. During the time ragtime was popular, it was a world-wide craze. Brahms wrote some, and so did Stravinsky. In fact, the last thing Stravinsky wrote before 'A Soldier's Tale' was a ragtime piece, and that helps explain the quirky style of that piece.
If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.
That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.
W. H. Hadow commenting on the music of Johannes Brahms In him converge all previous streams of tendency, not as into a pool, stagnant, passive, motionless, but as a noble river that received its tributary waters and bearss them onward in larger and statelier volume.
Brahms believed that there was no need to publish absolutely everything that Schubert ever wrote.
Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.
The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary. ... rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.
I don't believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.
The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.
We have hundreds of pieces of new music being composed every year. How many will last This has always been true. How many of Brahms' pieces lasted And what of Brahms' contemporaries, the ones whose work hasn't survived It is unfair to compare today's music to what has endured, which is only the greatest music. The point is to listen, to keep listening.