Saturday, March 26, 2011


Music is the mediator between the sensual and the spiritual life.

-- Ludwig van Beethoven
(in Music: A Book of Quotations,
edited by Herb Galewitz)

Saturday, March 19, 2011


My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.

-- Edward Elgar
(in Divine Sparks,
edited by Karen Speerstra)

Saturday, March 12, 2011


A woman is singing in the valley. The shadows falling blot her out, but her song spreads over the fields.
. . . .

Her song, as pure as water filled with light, cleanses the plain and rinses the mean air of day in which men hate. From the throat of the woman who keeps on singing, day rises nobly evaporating toward the stars.

-- Gabriela Mistral
(translated by Langston Hughes)
(in Women in Praise of the Sacred,
edited by Jane Hirshfield)

Saturday, March 5, 2011


Our soul was from the beginning endowed with the principle of this music, for the heavenly harmony is rightly said to be innate in anything whose origin is heavenly. This harmony is then imitated by various instruments and songs. This gift like the rest was give us through the love of the divine providence.

-- Marsilio Ficino
(translated by Sears Reynolds Jayne)
(in Philosophies of Art and Beauty,
edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns)