Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
Yehudi MenuhinRead
The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency---half tiger,half poet.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the duality of the violinist, combining the ferocity of a tiger with the sensitivity of a poet.
Yehudi Menuhin's quote captures the essence of a violinist's artistry, illustrating the balance between raw passion and emotional depth. It suggests that a great musician embodies both the fierce determination and intensity of a tiger, as well as the delicate expressiveness and creativity of a poet, demonstrating the complexity of human expression in music.
Themes
ViolinistArtistryMusicEmotionDuality
In practice
Example use cases
At a concert, one might reflect on how the violinist embodies both strength and vulnerability.
More from Yehudi Menuhin
All quotes βMusic lives and breathes to tell us who we are and what we face. It is a path between ourselves and the infinite.
Yehudi MenuhinRead
The practice of yoga induces a primary sense of measure and proportion. Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony.
Yehudi MenuhinRead
Improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul.
Yehudi MenuhinRead
We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self β the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.
Yehudi MenuhinRead
It is music that welds spiritual and sensual, that can convey ecstasy free of guilt, faith without dogma, love as homage, and a person at home with nature and the infinite.
Yehudi MenuhinRead
Similar quotes
Little Axe's records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption.
Mark FisherRead
A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.
Johann Gottfried HerderRead
Literature is the most beautiful of countries
Jose MartiRead
A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.
George C. WolfeRead
I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.
Paul RandRead
It's kind of a subversive act to tell a story of a woman past a certain age, to develop a four-hour movie based on a marriage and a story of two people past middle age.
Frances McdormandRead