I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the struggle of an artist to adapt to new artistic styles while feeling disconnected from both the old and the new.
Sergei Rachmaninoff captures the artist's dilemma of feeling out of place in a changing world. It conveys the profound conflict between personal artistic identity and the evolution of art forms, illustrating the emotional burden of trying to adapt to contemporary trends while still being tethered to established traditions.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a speech about the challenges artists face in modern society.
What is Music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love! Music is the Sister of Poetry and her Mother is sorrow!
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.
Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music.
The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. If then two or three natural accents can be added, obviously no harm is done. The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.
The dancer of the future will be one whose body & soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of the soul will have become the movement of the body.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.