Michael Steen > Quotes

“Sibelius’ personal secretary conceded that ‘when a small nation of four million people produces an artist whose acclaim is truly universal, it is easy to understand that in his own country his importance is unreasonably exaggerated’. 90 Does this astonishingly candid remark perhaps give us an insight into what nationalism in music is really about?”
― Michael Steen, The Lives and Times of the Great Composers

“Bartók, like Janáek, carried out a considerable amount of research into folk music. He would travel into the countryside with his camera and his Edison wax disks to record Hungarian, Romanian and Slovakian folk music and customs. He went to Turkey and to north Africa to pursue the origins of these. ‘We must isolate the very ancient, for this is the only way of identifying the really new’, he said.”
― Michael Steen, The Lives and Times of the Great Composers