Thursday, January 06, 2011

"One and one makes - one"

Arvo Part, at a loss for inspiration, went outside into the snow one morning and asked the cleaner: "What should a composer do?" "Well, he should love every note," was the reply. "No professor had ever told me something like that," Part said, and this single sentence crystallised his thinking.


3 comments:

Lally said...

Never heard or read that before. Thanks for it.

Geofhuth said...

A favorite composer of mine. And certainly my favorite Estonian one.

orionse,

Geof

gary barwin said...

That's a great story. When I studied with Louis Andriessen, he'd sometimes look at a whole note filling an entire bar of 4/4 and say, "That's a bourgeois note," meaning that it sat, full and self satisfied, not really doing anything. I think I prefer the lovingkindness approach to notes.

April Fool?