I believe that tone goes way beyond the range between pianissimo and fortissimo, between legato and staccato, etc. Tone is radiance, eagerness, light, darkness, devastation, something that melts, something that cries and burns, something that shatters.
I do not believe in playing “programs”—ending with a blaze of Liszt. I couldn’t play the Campanella to save my life, but I don’t see that it matters.
I do not believe in “program” music—beginning with Bach (now that the public has learned to applaud him) and ending with Liszt. I couldn’t play the Campenella to save my life, but I don’t see that it matters.
I do not believe in nature music—babbling brooks and warbling birds. I believe in nature mood, just as I do in the mood of all great phenomena.
The music I have made will be sometimes merely the curve of a mood—like the curve of line in Watts’s Orpheus and Eurydice; or merely the design of a color or a scent. But always it will keep close to two fundamentals: that “hard gemlike flame” and the rhythm of sex.
All this will come under the classification of those things which are so worth knowing that they can never be taught. It will belong to that individual who can say the new word—his own word. It will make the piano something we have scarcely dreamed of. It will make up an art that has nothing to do with the four walls of a room. It could not be set to “Questions and Answers” in The Ladies’ Home Journal. It will have little to do with accomplishment, but everything to do with that which is of all things the highest manifestation of life.
Blue-Prints
Harriet Dean
Debutante
You are a faded shawl about the shoulders of your mother. A puff of wind catches at your fluttering edge to jerk you away. But she draws you close, growing cold in the warm young breeze. She holds you with her shiny round pin, as all young ones are clasped to old by round things grown shiny with age.