Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes
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The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.
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Before going any further may we take it that the object of art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties – of that, in fact, which is spiritual? And that the means which we employ to induce this revelation are those very senses and faculties themselves?
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No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.
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But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.
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The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.
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I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.
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The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is 'wrong' and arises from insular ignorance.
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Film contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of.
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The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.
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The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.
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Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.
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It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.