💬 SenQuotes.com
 Quotes

Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes

English composer and educator (b. 1872), Birth: 12-10-1872, Death: 26-8-1958 Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes
1.
There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City - the intuition that I had been there already.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

2.
The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

3.
Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

4.
I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

5.
But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

Similar Authors: Friedrich Nietzsche Wayne Dyer Stephen Covey Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Karl Marx John Adams Dale Carnegie Jean-Jacques Rousseau Maria Montessori Alan Moore Wallace Stevens Leo Buscaglia Scott Westerfeld Shunryu Suzuki Randy Pausch
6.
The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

7.
There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

8.
I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

Quote Topics by Ralph Vaughan Williams: Musical Art Music Sound Opera Expression Soul Men Writing Mean Sight Nations Study Night Teacher Trying Atheist Two Work Disappointment Inheritance Often Is Should Talking Long Attitude Country Unsaid Composer Left
9.
Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

10.
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.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

11.
To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

12.
It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

13.
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.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

14.
The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

15.
The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

16.
I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

17.
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.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

18.
Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

19.
Have we not all about us forms of a musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

20.
A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.
Ralph Vaughan Williams

21.
Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?
Ralph Vaughan Williams

22.
Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.
Ralph Vaughan Williams