Quotes & Sayings About Bartok

Candid and searing, Deborah Jiang Stein's memoir is a remarkable story about identity, lost and found, and about the author's journey to reclaim - and celebrate - that most primal of relationships, the one between mother and child. I dare you to read this book without crying. — Mira Bartok

Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur. — Mira Bartok

Children of the mentally ill learn early on how not to be a bother, especially if they grew up with neglect. As my sister insisted once, when she was in severe pain after injuring her ankle, 'This isn't me! This is not who I am! — Mira Bartok

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 Bartok

Memory, if it is anything at all, is unreliable. — Mira Bartok

By the time I had complete my 22nd year, I was a new man - an atheist. — Bela Bartok

As Bartok put it so succinctly: "Competitions are for horses." Nothing could be more barbaric that the practice or ranking artists as though they were divers or figure skaters ... What one suspects is that the appetite for dividing the world into winners and losers, anointed and anonymous, is so compulsive that it feeds with special, vindictive hunger on the most elusive and ephemeral of subjects. For if music can be reduced to games of power and success, then innocence-love without profit-can be dealt a crushing blow. — Russell Sherman

We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling. — Mira Bartok

Competitions are for horses, not artists. — Bela Bartok

We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong. — Mira Bartok

It is odd that the Bible says, 'God created man,' whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, 'The body is mortal, the soul is immortal,' whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the body) is transitory. — Bela Bartok

My dog, Ginger, is jumpy-like me-sensitive to sound and sudden movement. She wasn't that way at first, but not long after we got her, my grandfather told me to stand still outside and hold her leash tight. Then he shot a gun off by our feet, several times. "This is how girls learn to obey," he said, "how to be seen and not heard." — Mira Bartok

In some ways I believe music is the more convincing communicator of ideas than words. For instance, we can hear of Kordaly and Bartok and recognise them as Hungarian, but very few of us speak Hungarian, but the music itself speaks to more people. — Leonard Slatkin

He [Nicolaus Steno] told the audience, Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend. — Mira Bartok

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing. — Bela Bartok

Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do comprehend. — Mira Bartok

Early mornings were given over to Bartok and Schoenberg. Midmorning I treated myself to the vocals of Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, Louis Jordan and Bull Moose Jackson. A piroshki from the Russian delicatessen next door was lunch and then the giants of bebop flipped through the air. Charlie Parker and Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and Al Haig and Howard McGhee. Blues belonged to late afternoons and the singers' lyrics of lost love spoke to my solitude. — Maya Angelou

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

I don't want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges. — Mira Bartok

If the reader were so rash as to purchase any of Bela Bartok's compositions, he would find that they each and all consist of unmeaning bunches of notes, apparently representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform or ears to listen too. — Frederick Corder

With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure. — Bela Bartok

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution. — Bela Bartok

Eloquent and moving ... an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of love - beyond faith and dogma. It reminds us of why we are here: to love and live fully, to be curious about all things, and to live a compassionate - and passionate - authentic life. — Mira Bartok

Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss. — Mira Bartok

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach. — Bela Bartok

I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis. — Mira Bartok

At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, "To Rachel, from Daddy." The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me - both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father's dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, "The only paradise is paradise lost. — Mira Bartok

What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears; gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy is a dresser when you're the only one pushing it against the door? I feel truly on my own. — Mira Bartok

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces. — Leonard Slatkin

No one can get reall drunk on a novle or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's night, Bartok's Sonata for two Pianos and percussion or the Beatles' White Album? He loved mozart as much as rock.
He considered music a liberating force, it liberated him from lonliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of hi body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends, He loved to dance an regretted that Sabina did not share his passion
pg 92-93 — Milan Kundera

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

Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired? — Mira Bartok