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sample-results.txt
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"<p>The music of the Berlin choir was churchlike in its composition, and it was exclusively vocal; [... it] was, intellectually and tastefully considered, music of a high order; [... it] was ecclesiastical, religious music.</p>"
"<p><span lang=""EN-GB"" style=""mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"">I have revisited a great deal of music lately, some of it after a seventy-year interim, the revisiting therefore heavily buffeted by past involvements and discoveries of radical differences between remembered and renewed experiences. Certain songs and piano pieces by Schumann, for instance, have jolted me sharply. Schumann is <em style=""mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"">the </em><span style=""mso-spacerun: yes;""> </span>composer of childhood (first childhood; I will not say who I think is the composer of second childhood), both because he created a children’s imaginative world and because children learn some of their first music in his marvellous piano albums. In fact I have just realized that the reason I dislike <em style=""mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"">Carnaval</em> is not, as I had supposed, that my musical personality lacks identities corresponding to the Florestan and Eusebius archtypes of all of Schumann’s music, but simply that I was told to like it as a child; and the force of these childhood atavisms is such that I am not old enough to dislike it independently even now. </span></p>"
"<p>The most striking era in the history of music was the invention of the pianoforte [1700] ; before its introduction it might be said there was no domestic music, certainly no singing. The harpsichord was ill adapted to support the voice. Indeed, there was no music prepared for it. We heard nothing but sailors' rude songs, and galloping hunting songs, which the ladies were constrained to sing, for want of better music. The invention of the pianoforte, like the introduction of tea, softened the manners of the age, increased the refinement of the mind, and gave an elegance to society by the addition of the female voice to domestic vocal music.</p>"
"<p class=""MsoNormal"">Went to walk in the Rotunda Gardens in the evening, but being alone could not stand the staring I had to encounter; […] should like to have sauntered there a little longer, listening to the music, as the scene altogether brought back young days of courtship and carelessness to my mind.</p>"
"<p>Listening to music. Like Fauré, Vaughan William's catalogue is all slow. But if Fauré wrote fast music which was really slow music played fast, Vaughan Williams didn't even pretend to write fast music (i.e., metronomically fast). As for the <em>Oxford Elegy</em>, I have a constitutional allergy to the accompanied spoken voice - to melodrama. Pomposity. If the sung voice is the most musical of instruments, the spoken voice is the least.</p>"
"<p>JH, who's been listening to Mahler with increasing testiness, says it all sounds like Ice Capade music. </p>"
"<p>On the establishment of infant schools in Leicester, I was requested to furnish the young aspirants with some simple songs, suitable to their understanding and voice, and I had the satisfaction of hearing the four little songs... sung with spirit and pleasure. It was obvious that the children comprehended both the words and the music, and entered into it with all the enthusiasm of a hundred professional performers. Slight as this tuition is, it will awaken a sense for harmonious sounds in the rising generation, and do much towards laying the foundation of a more general taste for music in England.</p>"
"<p>Here is the program of our last concert. I hope you will agree with the way your work was placed between the Stravinsky suite and H.P.[Ballet by Chávez]. The performance was accurate and “simple”; we had 10 rehearsals and it was worked out with the utmost of interest and energy; the orchestra men were at first sceptical but by the third rehearsal or so they had a more genuine and growing interest. / I was amazed to see this, as it seldom happens with your works and mine. This last concert was the best of the entire season; it was warm and enthusiastic. It is impossible to tell you in a few words how much I enjoy the Little Symphony. I have already begun to write an essay on it which I intend to send to Minna Lederman for Modern Music. / The dialectic of this music, that is to say, its movement, the way each and every note comes out from the other as the only natural and logically possible one, is simply unprecedented in the whole history of music. The work as a whole, I mean to say in its entirety, is an organism, a body in which every piece works by itself 100% but whose mutual selection is such, that no one part could possibly work and exist without the other. There has been much talk about music in which everything is essential, nothing superfluous, but, as far as I know, the talk about such music exists, yes, but not the music itself. The Little Symphony is the first realization of this I know of, and yet the human content, the inner expression is purely emotional. It is precisely that tremendous human impulse which made possible such realization. / What I understand by “modern music” or “contemporary music” is merely our music; all the res belongs to historical periods, no matter how close or dear these historical periods may be to us…Let me tell you what I thought when I got the Little Symphony- well, here is the real thing, here, is our music, here is my music, the music of my time, of my taste, of my culture, here it is, a simple and natural fact to myself, as everything belonging to oneself is simple and natural.</p>"
"<p>Braga’s serenade, 'A Maiden’s Prayer', plays an important part in 'The Black Monk'. Once upon a time it was very popular, but now the music is forgotten. I’ll definitely use it in the opera. I even have a recording of it, I asked some young musicians to play it for me. When I listen to it, I can picture clearly what the opera must be like. I also think about this: what, in essence, is good music and bad music? I don’t know, I can’t answer definitively. Take that serenade, for instance. According to all the rules it should be bad music, but every time I listen to it, tears come to my eyes. And that music, that 'Maiden’s Prayer', must have affected Chekhov too, or he wouldn’t have written about it as he did, with such insight. Probably there is no good or bad music, there is only music that excites you and music that leaves you indifferent. That’s all. / And that, by the way, makes me sad. For example, my father liked gypsy songs and sang them, and I liked the music. But then those songs were humiliated so much, reduced to mud. They called it ‘Nepman’ music, bad taste, and so on. I remember how shocked Prokofiev was when I told him that I personally wasn’t offended by gypsy music. He used every opportunity to point out that he felt above such things.</p>"