Allen Shawn > Quotes

“A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy's feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight...”
― Allen Shawn

“I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable.”
― Allen Shawn

“Disagreeing with his cousin’s characterization of the Bible as “nonsense,” he wrote that, on the contrary, one could find in it “all of the most difficult questions concerning Morals, Lawmaking, Industry, and Medical Science … resolved in the most simple way, often treated from a contemporary point of view.” He also urged her to read his own letters to her more carefully, saying that each sentence contained something specific and that “if perhaps the surface seems smooth to you, the water is very deep, and often the smoother the surface the deeper the water.”
― Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey

“A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them.”
― Allen Shawn

“Personally I had the feeling as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water, and not knowing how to swim or get out in another manner, I tried with my legs and arms as best I could. I did not know what saved me; why I was not drowned or cooked alive. I have perhaps only one merit: I never gave up. But how could I give up in the middle of an ocean? ARNOLD SCHOENBERG IN 1947”
― Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey

“Zemlinsky, who was to be on the panel of judges, played through the first few for Schoenberg and, finding them “wonderful and truly original,” agreed with him that, regrettably, “precisely on that account they would have little chance of winning the prize.” Schoenberg’s response was not to abandon the project but to expand it.”
― Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey

“the fantasy, power, songfulness, beauty, and humor of the music itself has been not so much overlooked as rendered secondary to the discussion of it by experts. Instead of his reputation’s creating curiosity about his work, his work has been buried by (and beneath) his reputation.”
― Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey

“During the period when Schoenberg actually hoped to earn an income from the works, forty of his paintings were shown in a small one-man exhibit in Vienna in 1910. Later some of his work was exhibited alongside that of painters such as Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Rousseau, and Egon Schiele. Gustav Mahler anonymously purchased some of these paintings to help support the painter/composer. In”
― Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey

“Brahms remained a lifelong touchstone, for the concision, asymmetry, and harmonic adventurousness of his musical language, which left an evident imprint on even twelve-tone works such as the Piano Concerto, but also for his subtle relationship to both tradition and innovation (the subject of Schoenberg’s 1947 essay “Brahms the Progressive”). From Brahms Schoenberg also learned the “chamber music” way of thinking—in which each instrument in a work is a lively, soloistic participant—that characterized even his orchestral music.”
― Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey

“the so-called Waidhofen Manifesto of the mid-1880s barring Jews from membership in student organizations and fraternities. He quotes these lines from that document, and they are explicit: “Everyone of a Jewish mother, every human being in whose veins flows Jewish blood, is from the day of his birth without honor and void of all the refined emotions.… He is ethically subhuman.”
― Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey