Bela Bartok Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.”
-- Bela Bartok -
“Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.”
-- Bela Bartok -
“In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.”
-- Bela BartokSource : "Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening". Book by Joseph Machlis, 1955.
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“I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.”
-- Bela BartokSource : Quoted in Machlis Introduction to Contemporary Music (1963).
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“Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.”
-- Bela BartokSource : "The Listening Composer". Book by George Perle, pp. 46-47, 1996.
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“It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.”
-- Bela Bartok -
“With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.”
-- Bela Bartok -
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“If it isn't good, let it die. If it doesn't die, make it good.”
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“A camel is a horse designed by committee.”
Source : Gordon R. Dickson (1978). “The Far Call”
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“The more an artist works the more there is to do.”
Source : Ad Reinhardt, Barbara Rose (1991). “Art-as-art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt”, p.56, Univ of California Press
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“The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.”
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