The folksong collectors Bartok (Hungary) and Plicka (Czechoslovakia) notated the perceived interval deviations with a plus or minus sign (+,-). Older folksong collectors had notated all the intervals in the system of semitones, not observing the finer modifications of intervals. This first gained currency from the phongraph and tape recordings of folk music from various lands....From folksong I learned to perceive melodic intervals a little smaller or greater than those of the semitone-system....In my youth it often happened that the folk singers, who during the intermissions of dance festivals sang songs of "their kind," deviating from the semitone system, demanded that the first violinist of the Wisowitzer Kapelle play "their" melody just as they sang it. Once a tempermental singer threatened to strike the double-bass player with a beer mug if he didn't "play along" with the song, exactly as he sang it.
Alois HábaRelated topics
beer currency dance finer folk hungary interval kapelle kind melody minus mug music observing once play player plus sang semitone sign singer song strike system tape violinist youth bartok folksong czechoslovakia double-bassRelated quotes
Our presence will serve as an incentive for al Qaeda to grow in numbers and motivate more suicide bombers. An indefinite presence, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, will continue to drain our financial resources, undermine our national defense, demoralize our military and exacerbate our financial crisis. All this will be welcomed by Osama Bin Laden, just as he planned it. It's actually more than he had hoped for. [...] The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be much bigger, unless the dollar follows the path of the dollar-based world financial system and collapses into runaway inflation. In this case, the laws of economics and the realities of history will prove superior to the madness of maintaining a world empire financed by scraps of paper. Our military prowess, backed by a nuclear arsenal, will not suffice in overcoming the tragedy of a currency crisis. Soviet nukes did not preserve its empire or the communist economy.
Ron Paul
We are told that Shakespeare's plays were generally performed in barns and that no great trouble was taken over the production. The constant changes of scene which, incidentally, seem the sign of a decadent art rather than one which is progressing, were shown by placards with the inscription: "A Forest," "A Prison," and so on. Within this conventional setting the onlooker's imagination was free to follow the actions of the various characters who were animated by passions drawn from nature, and that was enough for him. So-called innovations are gratefully seized on as an excuse for poverty of invention and in the same way, the long descriptive passages that so overburden modern novels are a sign of sterility, for it is obviously easier to describe a dress or the outward appearance of an object than to trace the subtle development of a character or portray the emotions of the heart.
Eugène Delacroix
The evil of marriage, as is it practiced in the European countries, extends further than we have yet described. The method is for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are led to conceive it their wiser policy, to shut their eyes upon realities, happy, if by any perversion of intellect, they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of each other. Thus the institution of marriage is made a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgement in the daily affair of their life, must be expected to have a crippled judgement in every other concern.
William Godwin
It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,-this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.
Thomas Carlyle
The 2004 tour hasn't ended. I still have to finish Latin America and Europe. [Celia Cruz and I] were good friends. Emilio did her first video; we wrote a song for her. I would have loved to have had her there [when recording "90 Millas"]. But she was there. I felt her. That's the beauty of a legacy. Celia was economical and tasty in her choices. And in the pocket like you wouldn't believe? [Which means] It's like a rhythm, from son music. To have it it is to be locked in, like a tuned engine. Once you're in the pocket, you're free. That's why, for most of these songs, I sang and I sang until I had the emotion, then . . . one take. {Couldn't you be considered the heiress to Celia Cruz?] you can't give yourself a title! That's crazy! If I ever start talking like that, please put me out of my misery. I don't care if I'm 80, with my butt to my ankles, put me down.
Gloria Estefan
