“We cling nervously to the melody, but we don't handle it freely, we don't really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it.”
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It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
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Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
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Those who enjoy their own emotionally bad health and who habitually fill their own minds with the rank poisons of suspicion, jealousy and hatred, as a rule take umbrage at those who refuse to do likewise, and they find a perverted relief in trying to denigrate them.
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Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
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