K-Line: Ludwig van Beethoven

Showing posts with label Ludwig van Beethoven. Show all posts

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Agape Agape - pg. 15

"The biggest thrill in music is playing it yourself. It's your own participation that rouses your emotions most," whole thing breaks your heart, here's another. "Retains its artistic 'feel' indefinitely," goes back to the turn of the century before the player piano, when it was still the piano player, big thing you wheeled up to the piano same punched roll it played on the keys with wooden fingers, tiny felt-tipped wooden fingers playing Scarlatti, Bach, Haydn "and old Handel. Unhappy Schubert speaks to them in the sweet tones of Rosamunde. Beethoven, master of masters, thrills alike" right on to Chopin bemoaning the fate of Poland and breathing "the fiery valor of his countrymen in Polonaise" and here's Debussy and Grieg giving testimonials. "Many of the artists will never play again, but their phantom hands will live forever" there that's what it's about, no more wooden fingers byt phantom hands. "What stands between you and the music of the masters?"

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Hopscotch - pg. 8

As for me, I'm already used to the fact that quietly exceptional things happen to me, and I don't find it too horribe when I go into a dark room looking for a record album and fell in my hand the wriggling form of a centipede who has chosen to sleep in the binding. That sort of thing. Or finding great gray or green tufts in a pack of cigarettes, or hearing the whistle of a locomotive coincide, ex officio in time and pitch with a passage from a symphony by Ludwig van, or going into a pissotiere on the Rue de Medicis and seeing a man apply himself to his urination and then step back from the urinal towards me as he holds in the palm of his hand as if it were a precious liturgical object a member of incredible colors and dimensions, and my realizing at that moment that this man is the replica of another (although they are not the same one) who twnety-four hours before in the Salle de Geographie had been lecturing on totems and taboos and had held up carefully in the palm of his hand ivory sticks, lyrebird feathers, ritual coins, magic fossils, starfish, dried fish, photographs of royal concubines, offering of hunters, enormous embalmed beetles which made the inevitable ladies present quiver with startled delight.