MUSIC — QUIZ

[Anonymouṡ No.20267181]

[Anonymouṡ No.20267182]

One hundred more-or-less musical quotations to identify. A couple in translation; a couple non-fiction. Some authors and works appear more than once. Names left unredacted this time. Hints on request.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267188]

1)
There are four of us sitting in Good Time Charley Bernstein's little joint in Forty-eighth Street one Tuesday morning about four o'clock, doing a bit of quartet singing, very low, so as not to disturb the copper on the beat outside, a very good guy by the name of Carrigan, who likes to get his rest at such an hour.


2)
His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play.


3)
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.


4)
He coils so close about his double-bass,
Serpentine and entranced,
That they form a single creature...


5)
One program came on after another, and all of them were punk. She didn't especially care. She smoked and picked a little bunch of grass blades. After a while a new announcer started talking. He mentioned Beethoven. She had read in the library about that musician — his name was pronounced with an a and spelled with double e. He was a German fellow like Mozart. When he was living he spoke in a foreign language and lived in a foreign place — like she wanted to do. The announcer said they were going to play his third symphony. She only halfway listened because she wanted to walk some more and she didn't care much what they played. Then the music started. Mick raised her head and her fist went up to her throat.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267195]

6)
Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?


7)
Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, O jazzmen.


8)
I see that I have alluded above to his powers upon the violin. These were very remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments. That he could play pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and other favourites. When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy was more than I could determine.


9)
“Do I hear a strain from Scarlatti?” Ignatius asked finally.
“I thought I was whistling ‘Turkey in the Straw.’”
“I had hoped that you might be familiar with Scarlatti’s work. He was the last of the musicians,” Ignatius observed and resumed his furious attack upon the long hot dog. “With your apparent musical bent, you might apply yourself to something worthwhile.”


10)
MRS ORGAN MORGAN:
And when you think of all those babies she's got, then all I can say is she'd better give up bird nesting that's all I can say, it isn't the right kind of hobby at all for a woman that can't say No even to midgets. Remember Bob Spit? He wasn't any bigger than a baby and he gave her two. But they're two nice boys, I will say that, Fred Spit and Arthur. Sometimes I like Fred best and sometimes I like Arthur. Who do you like best, Organ?

ORGAN MORGAN:
Oh, Bach without any doubt. Bach every time for me.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267205]

11)
I was trying to learn the Chopin study, because those wild broken chords, that storm of notes had seemed so exactly to express and contain my own dry-mouthed and hopeless passion for Imogen Greatley; but the technical difficulties were enormous and obsessed me. I explained. “There’s a note — G natural — I have to hit it in passing with this finger, you see — ”

I held my right forefinger up close to her face. She took it in both hands and examined it, pulling it about.

“Ow! Careful! It’s a bit sore — ”


12)
Luster fed him with skill and detachment. Now and then his attention would return long enough to enable him to feint the spoon and cause Ben to close his mouth upon the empty air, but it was apparent that Luster's mind was elsewhere. His other hand lay on the back of the chair and upon that dead surface it moved tentatively, delicately, as if he were picking an inaudible tune out of the dead void, and once he even forgot to tease Ben with the spoon while his fingers teased out of the slain wood a soundless and involved arpeggio until Ben recalled him by whimpering again.


13)
I turned the radio on, found a symphony, and squeezed the ointment out of the tube. It was green. I applied it thoroughly. Then I lay down on the bed and looked at the clock. Thirty minutes. Hell, I hated those crabs, I'd take an hour's worth. After forty-five minutes it started to burn. I'll kill every one of those fuckers, I thought. The burning increased. I rolled over on the bed and clenched my fists. I listened to Beethoven. I listened to Brahms, I hung on. I barely made the hour.


14)
And the maneater
Opens its mouth and the music
Sinks its claw
Into your skull, a single note

Picks you up by the small of the back, weightless
Vaults into space, dangling your limbs

Devours you leisurely among litter of stars
Digests you into its horrible joy
The is the tiger of heaven

Hoists people out of their clothes

Leaves its dark track across the octaves


15)
Without warning, a Canadian officer poured a beer into the bell of my saxophone — (Yes! I also played that) — which he thought funny. I threw the contents onto his jacket, something he didn't think funny. He grabbed the saxophone. I stopped playing. "Let go," I said, "this is a solo instrument."

[Anonymouṡ No.20267211]

16)
Henry weak at keyboard music, leanèd on
the slow movement of Schubert's Sonata in A
& the mysterious final soundings
of Beethoven's 109-10-11 & the Diabelli Variations
You go by the rules but there the rules don't matter
is what I've been trying to say.


17)
Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff beer — which is not strictly relevant at this point since the record hadn't yet got to that bit, but there will be too much else going on when it does, and furthermore the chronicler does not intend to sit here with a track list and a stopwatch, so it seems best to mention it now while things are still moving slowly.


18)
By hell the fiddle is the man, said Lamont, the fiddle is the man for me. Put it into the hand of a lad like Luke MacFadden and you'll cry like a child when you hear him at it. The voice was number one, I don't deny that, but look at the masterpieces of musical art you have on the fiddle! Did you ever hear the immortal strains of the Crutch Sonata now, the whole four strings playing there together, with plenty of plucking and scales and runs and a lilt that would make you tap the shoe-leather off your foot? Oh, it's the fiddle or nothing. You can have your voice, Mr. Furriskey, — and welcome. The fiddle and the bow is all I ask, and the touch of the hand of Luke MacFadden, the travelling tinsmith. The smell of his clothes would knock you down, but he was the best fiddler in Ireland, east or west.


19)
It was then half-past nine. I held my head between my hands to keep it from bursting. I closed my eyes; I would not think any longer. There was another half-hour to wait, another half-hour of a nightmare, which might drive me mad.

At that moment I heard the distant strains of the organ, a sad harmony to an undefinable chant, the wail of a soul longing to break these earthly bonds. I listened with every sense, scarcely breathing; plunged, like Captain Nemo, in that musical ecstasy, which was drawing him in spirit to the end of life.


20)
He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267218]

21)
By the time Seymour was in mid-adolescence — sixteen, seventeen — he not only had learned to control his native vernacular, his many, many less than élite New York speech mannerisms, but had by then already come into his own true, bull's-eye, poet's vocabulary. His non-stop talks, his monologues, his near-harrangues then came as close to pleasing from start to finish — for a good many of us, anyway — as, say, the bulk of Beethoven's output after he ceased being encumbered with a sense of hearing, and maybe I'm thinking especially, though it seems a trifle picky, of the B-flat-major and C-sharp-minor quartets.


22)
Listening to the music, he leaned sideways on the sink, his chin in his hand, his strange maroon eyes half-closed. The Goldberg Variations interested him structurally. Here it came again, the bass progression from the saraband repeated, repeated. He nodded along, his tongue moving over the edges of his teeth. All the way around on top, all the way around on the bottom. It was a long and interesting trip for his tongue, like a good walk in the Alps.


23)
Eight days after they were dressed in san-benitos and their heads ornamented with paper mitres. The mitre and san-benito belonging to Candide were painted with reversed flames and with devils that had neither tails nor claws; but Pangloss's devils had claws and tails and the flames were upright. They marched in procession thus habited and heard a very pathetic sermon, followed by fine church music. Candide was whipped in time to the music; the Biscayner, and the two men who had refused to eat bacon, were burnt; and Pangloss was hanged, though that was not the custom.


24)
Edith purchased a used upright piano and had it put in the living room, against the wall which separated that room from William's study; she had given up the practice of music shortly before her marriage, and she now started almost anew, practicing scales, laboring through exercises that were too difficult for her, playing sometimes two or three hours a day, often in the evening, after Grace had been put to bed.


25)
"What do you do in your spare time?" I asked him.
"I play the piano a good deal," he said. "I have a seven-foot Steinway. Mozart and Bach mostly. I'm a bit old-fashioned. Most people find it dull stuff. I don't."
"Perfect casting," I said, and put a card somewhere.
"You'd be surprised how difficult some of that Mozart is," he said. "It sounds so simple when you hear it played well."
"Who can play it well?" I asked.
"Schnabel."
"Rubinstein?"
He shook his head. "Too heavy. Too emotional. Mozart is just music. No comment needed from the performer."

[Anonymouṡ No.20267225]

26)
ALGERNON:
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

LANE:
I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.


27)
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.


28)
As they looked out of the window there came falling gently as if it was flowing down the rain out of the sky, the clear voice of Goldberry singing up above them. They could hear few words, but it seemed plain to them that the song was a rain-song, as sweet as showers on dry hills, that told the tale of a river from the spring in the highlands to the Sea far below.


29)
PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.


30)
A single violin gave out a long note, then another a sixth above, dropped to the fifth (while the second violin began where the first had started), then leapt to the octave, and hung there suspended through two long beats. More than a hundred years before, Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later, four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproduction of Beethoven’s scribbles that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves and through a faint scratching and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven’s own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven’s convictions and emotions quivered out into the air. Slowly, slowly, the melody unfolded itself. The archaic Lydian harmonies hung on the air. It was an unimpassioned music, transparent, pure and crystalline, like a tropical sea, an Alpine lake. Water on water, calm sliding over calm; the according of level horizons and waveless expanses, a counterpoint of serenities. And everything clear and bright; no mists, no vague twilights. It was the calm of still and rapturous contemplation, not of drowsiness or sleep. It was the serenity of the convalescent who wakes from fever and finds himself born again into a realm of beauty. But the fever was ‘the fever called living’ and the rebirth was not into this world; the beauty was unearthly, the convalescent serenity was the peace of God. The interweaving of Lydian melodics was heaven.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267242]

31)
Miss Ingram, who had now seated herself with proud grace at the piano, spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, commenced a brilliant prelude; talking meantime. She appeared to be on her high horse to-night; both her words and her air seemed intended to excite not only the admiration, but the amazement of her auditors: she was evidently bent on striking them as something very dashing and daring indeed.

“Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day!” exclaimed she, rattling away at the instrument. “Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a step beyond papa’s park gates: nor to go even so far without mama’s permission and guardianship!”


32)
This song is extremely uplifting. The lyrics are as positive and affirmative as anything I've heard in rock.


33)
Bond walked over to the gramophone and picked up the record. It was George Feyer with rhythm accompaniment. He looked at the number and memorized it. It was Vox 500. He examined the other side and, skipping La Vie en Rose because it had memories for him, put the needle down at the beginning of Avril au Portugal.

Before he left the gramophone he pulled the blotter softly from under it and held it up to the standard lamp beside the writing-desk. He held it sideways under the light and glanced along it. It was unmarked. He shrugged his shoulders and slipped it back under the machine and walked back to his chair.

He thought that the music was appropriate to the girl. All the tunes seemed to belong to her. No wonder it was her favourite record. It had her brazen sexiness, the rough tang of her manner and the poignancy that had been in her eyes as they had looked moodily back at him out of the mirror.


34)
Doc cleared a place on the table for the clean glasses as he washed them. Then he unlocked the door of the back room and brought out one of his albums of Gregorian music and he put a Paternoster and Agnus Dei on the turn-table and started it going. The angelic, disembodied voices filled the laboratory. They were incredibly pure and sweet. Doc worked carefully washing the glasses so that they would not clash together and spoil the music. The boys’ voices carried the melody up and down, simply but with the richness that is in no other singing.


35)
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267249]

36)
Sam Singer soon had going on his cassette player a tape of the Fifth Symphony of Gustav Mahler. Listening again, he discovered more new things he treasured. The remarkable symphony was infinite in its secrets and multiple satisfactions, ineffable in loveliness, sublime, and hauntingly mysterious in the secrets of its power and genius to so touch the human soul. He could hardly wait for the closing notes of the finale to speed jubilantly to their triumphant end, in order to start right back at the beginning and revel again in all of the engrossing moments in which he was basking now.


37)
"It's the Halley Concerto," he answered, smiling.
"Which one?"
"The Fifth."
She let a moment pass, before she said slowly and very carefully, "Richard Halley wrote only four concertos."


38)
Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt’s, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss.


39)
As far as I know, the only person ever to put Japanese lyrics to the Beatles song "Yesterday" (and to do so in the distinctive Kansai dialect, no less) was a guy named Kitaru. He used to belt out his own version when he was taking a bath.

Yesterday
Is two days before tomorrow,
The day after two days ago.


40)
Margaret was laughing in the way Dixon had provisionally named to himself 'the tinkle of tiny silver bells'. He sometimes thought that the whole corpus of her behaviour derived from translating such phrases into action, but before he could feel much irritation with himself or her, she said: 'You know what you're in for, do you?'

In less than a minute Dixon did see, and clearly. Instead of the customary four parts, this piece employed five. The third and fourth lines of music from the top had Tenor I and Tenor II written against them; moreover, there was some infantile fa-la-la-la stuff on the second page with numerous gaps in the individual parts. Even Welch's ear might be expected to record the complete absence of one of the parts in such circumstances. It was much too late now for Dixon to explain that he hadn't really meant it when he'd said, half an hour before, that he could read music 'after a fashion'; much too late to transfer allegiance to the basses. Nothing short of an epileptic fit could get him out of this.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267255]

41)
'And the other great passion, young gentlemen, of this great heart was her love for her audience. And that was not for the great people, the proud princes and magnates and the lovely ladies, all in jewels; not even for the famous composers, musicians, critics, and men of letters, but for her galleries. Those poor people of the back streets and market places, who would give up a meal or a pair of shoes, the wages of hard labour, to crowd high up in the hot house and hear Pellegrina sing, and who stamped the floor, shrieked, and wept over her — she loved them beyond anything in the world.'


42)
I picked up the radio and noticed that it was also a tape recorder – one of those things with a cassette-unit built in. And the tape, Surrealistic Pillow, needed only to be flipped over. He had already gone through side one — at a volume that must have been audible in every room within a radius of 100 yards, walls and all.

“‘White Rabbit,'” he said. “I want a rising sound.”


43)
She wasn't, at that particular moment, watching the cat at all — as a matter of fact she had forgotten its presence — but as the first deep notes of Vivaldi sounded softly in the room, she became aware, out of the corner of one eye, of a sudden flurry, a flash of movement on the sofa to her right. She stopped playing at once. 'What is it?' she said, turning to the cat. 'What's the matter?'


44)
That was Venice, the flatteringly and suspiciously beautiful — this city, half legend, half snare for strangers; in its foul air art once flourished gluttonously, and had suggested to its musicians seductive notes which cradle and lull. The adventurer felt as though his eyes were taking in this same luxury, as though his ears were being won by just such melodies.


45)
Perhaps I was getting too old for the sort of jeezny I had been leading, brothers. I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And then there was old Felix M. with his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture. And there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age, then. But what was I going to do?

[Anonymous No.20267260]

>>20267188
>>20267195
>>20267211
>>20267218
>>20267225
good thread

[Anonymouṡ No.20267265]

46)
Old Major cleared his throat and began to sing. As he had said, his voice was hoarse, but he sang well enough, and it was a stirring tune, something between 'Clementine' and 'La Cucuracha'.


47)
The high note came, the pause, the resolution; and with the resolution the sailor's fist swept firmly down upon his knee. He leant back in his chair, extinguishing it entirely, sighed happily and turned towards his neighbour with a smile. The words 'Very finely played, sir, I believe' were formed in his gullet if not quite in his mouth when he caught the cold and indeed inimical look and heard the whisper, 'If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.'


48)
Betty said, 'Most true. Average taste really deplorable.'

'As in music,' Paul said. 'No interest in authentic American folk jazz, as example. Robert, are you fond of say Bunk Johnson and Kid Ory and the like? Early Dixieland jazz? I have record library of old such music, original Genet recordings.'

Robert said, 'Afraid I know little about Negro music.' They did not look exactly pleased at his remark. 'I prefer classical. Bach and Beethoven.' Surely that was acceptable. He felt now a bit of resentment. Was he supposed to deny the great masters of European music, the timeless classics in favor of New Orleans jazz from the honky-tonks and bistros of the Negro quarter?


49)
Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found nowhere in the wind, and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in nature. They were the notes of Farmer Oak’s flute.


50)
He joined his palms, and having raised them sought
The east with full attentiveness, as though
To say to God: "All other things are naught."

"Te lucis ante", with devoted flow,
So sweetly from his lips caressed my ears,
That I was moved beyond where thoughts can go.

Then softly he was followed by his peers,
Who harmonized that hymn, devout, subdued,
Their eyes intently on the distant spheres.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267269]

51)
One day, Athene made a double flute from stag’s bones, and played on it at a banquet of the gods. She could not understand, at first, why Hera and Aphrodite were laughing silently behind their hands, although her music seemed to delight the other deities; she therefore went away by herself into a Phrygian wood, took up the flute again beside a stream, and watched her image in the water, as she played. Realizing at once how ludicrous that bluish face and those swollen cheeks made her look, she threw down the flute, and laid a curse on anyone who picked it up. Marsyas was the innocent victim of this curse. He stumbled upon the flute, which he had no sooner put to his lips than it played of itself, inspired by the memory of Athene’s music; and he went about Phrygia in Cybele’s train, delighting the ignorant peasants. They cried out that Apollo himself could not have made better music, even on his lyre, and Marsyas was foolish enough not to contradict them.


52)
“How shall I say it? Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have..."


53)
He comes into the shop humming a Clash riff. Actually, “humming” is the wrong word: he’s making that guitar noise that all little boys make, the one where you stick your lips out, clench your teeth and go “DA-DA!” Barry is thirty-three years old.


54)
A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with glad notes of daybreak I hear,
A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense waves,
A transparent bass shuddering lusciously under and through the universe,
The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet flutes and violins, all these I fill myself with...


55)
'Jeeves,' I said, and you wouldn't be far out in describing me as stunned, 'did I hear you correctly?'
'Yes, sir.'
'You actually contemplate leaving my entourage?'
'Only with the greatest reluctance, sir. But if it is your intention to play that instrument within the narrow confines of a country cottage...'
I drew myself up.
'You say "that instrument", Jeeves. And you say it in an unpleasant, soupy voice. Am I to understand that you dislike this banjolele?'

[Anonymouṡ No.20267279]

56)
The curtain rose, as usual, to an almost empty house, it being one of the absurdities of Parisian fashion never to appear at the opera until after the beginning of the performance, so that the first act is generally played without the slightest attention being paid to it, that part of the audience already assembled being too much occupied in observing the fresh arrivals, while nothing is heard but the noise of opening and shutting doors, and the buzz of conversation.


57)
DEELEY:
(singing) The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses...

ANNA:
(singing) The waiters whistling as the last bell closes...

DEELEY:
(singing) Oh, how the ghost of you clings...

(Pause)

They don't make them like that any more.


58)
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions — "Must we die?"
Those commiserating sevenths — "Life might last! we can but try!


59)
THE ENGLISHMAN'S VERY SHY (FOX-TROT)

(BLOAT):
The Englishman’s very shy,
He’s none of your Ca-sa-no-va,
At bowling the ladies o-ver,
A-mericans lead the pack —

(TANTIVY):
— You see, your Englishman tends to lack
That recklessness transatlantic,
That women find so romantic
Though frankly I can’t see why...


60)
Did I ever tell you the most moving thing that I ever heard? It was when I was in Canada — I managed to slip over the border sometimes to some people I knew, and one night I heard some negress singing in a bar. Now you're going to smile at this, you're going to smile your educated English head off, because I suppose you've never sat lonely and half slewed in some bar among strangers a thousand miles from anything you think you understand. But if I ever saw any hope or strength in the human race it was in the face of that old fat negress getting up to sing about Jesus or something like that. She was poor and lonely and oppressed like nobody you've ever known. Or me, for that matter. I never even liked that kind of music, but to see that old black whore singing her heart out to the whole world, you knew somehow in your heart that it didn't matter how much you kick people, the real people, how much you despise them, if they can stand up and make a pure, just natural noise like that, there's nothing wrong with them, only with everybody else.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267287]

61)
She came over to my cage.
“I want to rub your head for luck before I go on,” she said.
“Thank you, Margaret,” I replied, “but that is not my head.”
She sang with incomparable sadness, with all the sorrow and sordidness that appear to be the lot of the unfortunate Gammas...


62)
The featurelessness of that cloud, now!
White as an eye all over!
The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship.
He felt for his food.
His fingers had the noses of weasels.
I couldn’t stop looking.

He could hear Beethoven:
Black yew, white cloud,
The horrific complications.
Finger-traps — a tumult of keys.


63)
As she moved towards the Bang & Olufsen, I said: “Track number nine. ‘The Nearness of You.’ That’s my special track.”

“‘The Nearness of You’ coming up.”

I’d settled on this track after some thought. The musicians in that band had been top-notch. Individually we’d all had more radical ambitions, but we’d formed the band with the express purpose of playing quality mainstream material, the sort the supper crowd would want. Our version of “The Nearness of You” — which featured my tenor all the way through — wasn’t a hundred miles from Tony Gardner territory, but I’d always been genuinely proud of it. Maybe you think you’ve heard this song done every way possible. Well, listen to ours.


64)
Fled is that music:— Do I wake or sleep?


65)
George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it. George thought the music might do him good — said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like.

Harris said he would rather have the headache.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267294]

66)
"Hav you practised sabotage against the skool piano by cutting wires so that low C sounds plunk?"
"I hav."
"Do you admit this led to subversive singing of D'ye Ken John Plunk in his plunk so gay?"
"I do."


67)
When she played the piano as she frequently did, (reserving an hour for practice every day), she cared not in the smallest degree for what anybody who passed down the road outside her house might be thinking of the roulades that poured from her open window: she was simply Emmeline Lucas, absorbed in glorious Bach or dainty Scarletti, or noble Beethoven. The latter perhaps was her favorite composer, and many were the evenings when with lights quenched and only the soft effulgence of the moon pouring in through the uncurtained windows, she sat with her profile, cameo-like (or like perhaps to the head on a postage stamp) against the dark oak walls of her music-room, and entranced herself and her listeners, if there were people to dinner, with the exquisite pathos of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Devotedly as she worshipped the Master, whose picture hung above her Steinway Grand, she could never bring herself to believe that the two succeeding movements were on the same sublime level as the first, and besides they "went" very much faster.


68)
Three or four hours. That is a long time to sit in one place, whether one be conspicuous or not, yet some of Wagner’s operas bang along for six whole hours on a stretch! But the people sit there and enjoy it all, and wish it would last longer. A German lady in Munich told me that a person could not like Wagner’s music at first, but must go through the deliberate process of learning to like it — then he would have his sure reward; for when he had learned to like it he would hunger for it and never be able to get enough of it.


69)
Other loves may sink and settle, other loves may loose and slack,
But I wander like a minstrel with a harp upon his back,
Though the harp be on my bosom, though I finger and I fret,
Still, my hope is all before me: for I cannot play it yet.


70)
— How did you like our music? That air they played, it had a certain — well, tell me what you thought of it.
— Could it have been Your Grace's own?
— Discovered! Now I'll never know your true opinion. And that's irksome, Thomas, for we artists, though we love praise, yet we love truth better.
— Then I will tell Your Grace truly what I thought of it.
— Speak then.
— To me it seemed — delightful.
— Thomas, I chose the right man for Chancellor.
— I must in fairness add that my taste in music is reputedly deplorable.
— Your taste in music is excellent. It exactly coincides with my own.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267296]

71)
When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. In Vinteuil's sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows.


72)
Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.
Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.


73)
It was a peaceful night, so still that he could occasionally hear the sound of the piano down at the Dry Bean saloon. The piano was the pride of the saloon, and, for that matter, of the town. The church folks even borrowed it on Sundays. Luckily the church house was right next to the saloon and the piano had wheels. Some of the deacons had built a ramp out at the back of the saloon, and a board track across to the church, so that all they had to do was push the piano right across to the church. Even so, the arrangement was a threat to the sobriety of the deacons, some of whom considered it their duty to spend their evenings in the saloon, safeguarding the piano. Once they safeguarded it so well on Saturday night that they ran it off its rail on Sunday morning and broke two legs off it.


74)
"Hope" is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —


75)
My appearance provoked another outburst of slightly hysterical laughter, and they all spontaneously broke into song again. They sang in round, and showed no sign of stopping, an Italian catch whose words I can remember since Titus and Gilbert had been singing it obsessively in the preceding days. Titus taught it to Gilbert and now Rosina had got it too. It went Eravamo tredici, siamo rimasti dodici, sei facevano rima, e sei facevan’ pima-poma-pima-poma. God knows what it was supposed to be about. Singing is of course a form of aggression. The wet open mouths and glistening teeth of the singers are ardent to devour the victim-hearer. Singers crave hearers as animals crave their prey.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267305]

76)
The organ strains come rich and resonant through the summer night, blended, sonorous, with that quality of abjectness and sublimation, as if the freed voices themselves were assuming the shapes and attitudes of crucifixions, ecstatic, solemn, and profound in gathering volume. Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.


77)
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread — the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player.


78)
Hear the sledges with the bells —
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells —
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.


79)
Now, even before the day was out, Wyatt was back staring through his window. After the near-silent midday meal, Aunt May sent him to his room for singing an indecent song.
— Singing? Gwyon demanded.
— He was humming it.
— But... humming? How...
— He knows the words well enough. It's a saloon song, he learned it from that... that dirty old man.


80)
TOM AND SAM:

There’s someone in the house with Dina
There’s someone in the house, I know,
There’s someone in the house with Dina
Playing on the old banjo.

(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)

[Anonymouṡ No.20267311]

81)
All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!


82)
Having, in the course of my patter, hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular — O my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those something nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic stuff and holding her under its special spell (special because of the garbling), and all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of God might interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of which all my being seemed concentrated, and this anxiety forced me to work, for the first minute or so, more hastily than was consensual with deliberately modulated enjoyment. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her; her voice stole and corrected the tune I had been mutilating...


83)
What is wanted, if one can only do a tiny scrap, is the suggestion when doing the tiny scrap that one could do much more, if one was playing on the sort of piano which appeals to one, but one can't, and to the kind of people one likes, which one isn't.

No need to detail the sixty different ways of making sure, if there is a piano in the room, that somebody will say, "Do you play?"

'No' is *wrong* answer to this question. *Right* is 'Yes — far too much I'm afraid. But never in public.'


84)
Music that gentler on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes...


85)
Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio — or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them — and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267320]

86)
“Oh-h-h, the Galacian girls
Will do it for pearls,
And the Arrakeen for water!
But if you desire dames
Like consuming flames,
Try a Caladanin daughter!”

“Not bad for such a poor hand with the pick,” Paul said, “but if my mother heard you singing a bawdy like that in the castle, she’d have your ears on the outer wall for decoration.”

Gurney pulled at his left ear. “Poor decoration, too, they having been bruised so much listening at keyholes while a young lad I know practiced some strange ditties on his baliset.”


87)
The first string that the musician usually touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in tune. God also plays upon this string first, when He sets the soul in tune for Himself. Only here was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing: he could play upon no other music but this till toward his latter end.


88)
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played...


89)
“Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”


90)
It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open. In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field-mice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, "Now then, one, two, three!" and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267328]

91)
"— Music too. Hope you didn't think I was only interested in ragtime. I practise every day — the last few months I've been taking a course in Zurich on the history of music. In fact it was all that kept me going at times — music and the drawing." She leaned suddenly and twisted a loose strip from the sole of her shoe and then looked up. "I'd like to draw you just the way you are now."

It made him sad when she brought out her accomplishments for his approval.


92)
yours is the music for no instrument
yours the preposterous colour unbeheld


93)
He reached for the paper and pretended to read it, but soon he was searching furtively among the radio programmes for the evening. He put his finger under a line which said '8.30 Symphony Concert. Brahms Symphony No.2'. He stared at it for a long time. The letters in the word 'Brahms' began to blur and recede, and gradually they disappeared altogether and were replaced by letters which spelt 'Botibol'. Botibol's Symphony No.2. It was printed quite clearly. He was reading it now, this moment. "Yes, yes," he whispered. "First performance. The world is waiting to hear it. Will it be as great, they are asking, will it perhaps be greater than his earlier work? And the composer himself had been persuaded to conduct. He is shy and retiring, hardly ever appears in public, but on this occasion he has been persuaded..."


94)
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.


95)
On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy's adolescent voice. She knew all the show hits, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill; especially she liked the songs from Oklahoma!, which were new that summer and everywhere. But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pineywoods or prairie. One went: Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.

[Anonymouṡ No.20267335]

96)
Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.


97)
"And then what happened?" he said.
"An' then he started singin', yerronner," said Cumbling Michael, licensed beggar and informal informant. "A song about Great Fiery Balls."
The Patrician raised an eyebrow.
"Pardon?"
"Somethin' like that. Couldn't really make out the words, the reason bein', the piano exploded."


98)
You, alone, alone, O imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.


99)
DUKE:
There’s for thy pains.

CLOWN:
No pains, sir; I take pleasure in singing, sir.

DUKE:
I’ll pay thy pleasure, then.


100)
There was a little silence. Through the open door came the sound of music. The passion had begun to fade from the celestial melody. Heaven, in those long-drawn notes, became once more the place of absolute rest, of still and blissful convalescence. Long notes, a chord repeated, protracted, bright and pure, hanging, floating, effortlessly soaring on and on. And then suddenly there was no more music; only the scratching of the needle on the revolving disc.

[Anonymous No.20268523]

Thank you for the effort—I love these threads, quizanon.

23: Candide
26: The Importance of Being Earnest
28: Hey! Come merry dol!
31: Jane Eyre
39: I don't know which book, but this has got to be Haruki Murakami.
65: Three Men in a Boat
77: Some Lovecraft short story where the old man plays viol, right?

Is there any Kazuo Ishiguro, especially The Unconsoled? Or Lost Horizon where he studies under Chopin's student? I don't recognize them here but recall lots of musical passages.

Can I get a hint or answer on 100? I have no clue what it is, but it intrigues me.

[Anonymouṡ No.20269534]

>>20268523

23 — Yep. Name was a hint, hehe.
26 — Yep.
28 — Yep. Another name that could have been censored I guess.
31 — Yes. A harder one for sure.
39 — Yes. It's a short story so moderately tricky. It's called "Yesterday", unexcitingly.
65 — Of course. Again the names were a hint I guess.
77 — Yes. The Music Of Erich Zann

There is one Ishiguro but a slightly less well-known piece (short story). Nothing from Lost Horizon. (I would have included it if I had remembered, probably.)

A hint for #100: it's the end of the chapter that #30 comes from. A less well-known work from a guy who wrote a famous dystopia.

[Anonymous No.20269663]

Lit music quotes and you dont include Jean-Christophe.... Smh

[Anonymous No.20269712]

bro I listen to panic at the disco

[Anonymous No.20269908]

>>20269534
Yep, the names helped a lot. I've read them all except for 39 but would have missed several without names.
>>short story
Ah, I haven't read Nocturnes (assuming that's the collection) in 4 years, so I'm not surprised I don't recognize it, even rereading these passages. I did spot Confederacy of Dunces for 9 this time.

[Anonymous No.20271109]

based autist OP delivering threads of a quality far too great for the eyes any of us mortals

[Anonymous No.20271164]

I don't reed.

[Anonymouṡ No.20271191]

>>20269908
Yeah, the Ishiguro is from Nocturnes. It's number 63. It's the one about the jazz saxophonist who meets the woman who steals him the music award she thinks he should have won, haha.

9 is indeed Mr Hotdog himself.

[Anonymous No.20271636]

>>20271109
>based autist OP delivering threads of a quality far too great for the eyes any of us mortals
This. Have a bump, blessed.

[Anonymous No.20271921]

>>20267181
48: The man in the high castle
86: Dune

[Anonymouṡ No.20271940]

>>20271921
Yup, both right. PKD obviously genuinely liked serious music. Most of his books feature it (since most of his MCs are self-inserts) e.g. in Broken Bubble where the guy gets sacked from the radio job because he refuses to read some crass commercial in the middle of a symphony or something haha.

[Anonymous No.20272014]

>>20267195
>I see that I have alluded above to his powers upon the violin. These were very remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments. That he could play pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and other favourites. When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy was more than I could determine.
Sherlock Holmes: A Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?

[Anonymous No.20272018]

>>20267225
30 - Point Counterpoint. This brought back some memories.
38 - Ulysses. Could probably make a thread just out of this alone.
75 - The Sea, The Sea. Reading this one just now.

Good effort, OP.

[Anonymouṡ No.20272062]

>>20272014
It's Sherlock Holmes, yes (although not Sign of Four.)

[Anonymouṡ No.20272072]

>>20272018
30 — Yep. Obscure book but pretty famous passage. (Also this gets you a second bonus answer in the thread.)
38 — Yeah. Of course it might not be the only one from that work in the thread.
75 — Yep. A coincidence to hit someone reading it. I thought this was one of the hardest for sure.

[Anonymous No.20272128]

9 - Confederacy of Dunces
12 - The Sound and the Fury(?)
20 - Blood Meridian
21 - Something by Salinger?
23 - Candide
24 - Stoner
27 - Something by Blake?
28 - Fellowship of the Ring
31 - Jane Eyre
33 - Something by Fleming
38 - Ulysses
39 - Yesterday (Murakami short story)
46 - Animal Farm
55 - Something by Wodehouse
59 - Gravity's Rainbow
70 - Wolf Hall
71 - Swann's Way
77 - Erich Zann(?)
79 - The Recognitions
88 - Kubla Khan
97 - Something by Pratchett

[Anonymous No.20272167]

>>20272072
lmao shows how observant I am.
Iris Murdoch doesn't get any love here and I think that's a shame.

[Anonymouṡ No.20272446]

>>20272128
9 — Yep. Someone else mentioned this.
12 — Right. Luster is obsessed with the guy playing the tune on the saw (later he wanders down to the cellar to try to find a saw so he can have a go himself).
20 — Of course (maybe a bit easy).
21 — Yep. But he has several books with Seymour in so it's still not trivial to nail the work.
23 — Right.
24 — Right. The names help. Edith being a cow and disturbing WS even when he retreats to his study.
27 — Nope. Roughly the right place & time though.
28 — Right. Someone else mentioned this.
31 — Yep.
33 — Sure, but need the book for full marks. (Bond avoiding La Vie en Rose is a reference to Casino Royale, so you know it comes after that, but since that's the first one it doesn't help much...)
38 — Yep. Typical Joyce.
39 — Yep. Someone else guessed the author but didn't know the work.
46 — Right. I guess the song is a reference to The Red Flag.
55 — Right but need the work I guess. Tricky admittedly since there are about 100 Jeeves books and they are all the same.
59 — Correct. He likes comic songs.
70 — Haha, not quite. You're right it's Henry VIII talking to Thomas More. But it's not Hilary M.
71 — It's Proust yeah but not SW.
77 — Right. A minor piece from Mr. HOLD ME NIGGERMAN
79 — Right. A tough one I think since lots of people mention this book but I bet few of them have read it. I thought it was funny the way the woman is disapproving but HOW DOES SHE KNOW IT'S A DIRTY SONG? Haha
88 — Yep.
97 — Yeah, the Patrician gives it away, but which book? (The Jerry Lewis reference suggests it's the one about rock'n'roll but that will only help to a rabid fan I guess.)

[Anonymous No.20273165]

Did you curate these yourself, OP?

[Anonymouṡ No.20273276]

>>20273165
Yeah.

[Anonymous No.20273489]

>>20273276
Nice. Gonna bump again; want to see some more guesses from other anons.

[Anonymous No.20274192]

>>20273276
we need more of you youre a gem