"Musician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the North Platte, I call him," laughed Nola; "the queerest little traveling musician in a thousand miles. He belongs back in the days of romance, when men like him went playing from castle to court—the ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... F. Niecks ("F. Chopin, Man and Musician," Vol. 1. German by Langhans. Leipzig, Leuckart, 1890), was written by Liszt and Chopin jointly, and was also signed by Chopin's friend Franchomme, the violoncellist. The part written by Chopin is indicated here by parentheses ().—Addressed to the well-known composer ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... can remember a few lines in Chilkat that I wrote some time ago," said the musician, as he again touched ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... literature, German literature has been said to be poor in stories of childhood. This criticism hardly applies to the new century, which has been called the century of the child. The fate of little Henry Lindner who is to be transformed by hook or by crook from a dreamy musician into a circumspect efficient man, and who suffers shipwreck on the reefs of mathematics, reminds us in many ways of the tragedy of the last Buddenbrook, Hanno, whose delicate sensibility is crushed out by the discipline ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... an athlete, a musician, an acrobat, a Lothario, a grim fighter, a sport of the first water. All day long the cat loafs about the house, takes things easy, sleeps by the fire, and allows himself to be pestered by the attentions of our womenfolk and annoyed by our children. To pass ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... measure to do the ordinary business, and endeavour to preserve her organ of taste with the utmost care, that it may be a faithful oracle to refer to on grand occasions, and new compositions.[53-*] Of these an ingenious cook may form as endless a variety, as a musician with his seven notes, or a painter with his colours: read chapters 7 and 8 of the Rudiments ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... simply not to be thought of. His uncle and the houseboat here occurred in very luminous colours to his mind. A musical composer (say, of the name of Jimson) might very well suffer, like Hogarth's musician before him, from the disturbances of London. He might very well be pressed for time to finish an opera—say the comic opera Orange Pekoe—Orange Pekoe, music by Jimson—"this young maestro, one of the most promising of our recent English school"—vigorous entrance of the drums, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in varied disguises, one, perhaps, coming up to us as a petty chief with a mounted escort, another as a merchant with a bullock cart to draw his packages of goods and a servant in attendance, yet another as a juggler or a musician, we could instantly recognize them as belonging to our brotherhood of Bowani by the secret signals with ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... a musician, so if I speak as a barbarian I must ask you and several gentlemen on the platform here to forgive me. From the lowest point of view a few drums and fifes in the battalion mean at least five extra miles in a route march, quite apart from the fact that they can swing a battalion back ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 27th, the first arrest was made. Sir William Brereton,[560] a gentleman of the king's household, was sent suddenly to the Tower; and on the Sunday after, Mark Smeton, of whom we know only that he was a musician high in favour at the court, apparently a spoilt favourite of royal bounty.[561] The day following was the 1st of May. It was the day on which the annual festival was held at Greenwich, and the queen appeared, as usual, with her husband and the court at the tournament. Lord Rochfort, the ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... head; he was humming absently, restless with perpetual nervous movements; he inquired anxiously if the bell had yet rung for the choir, frightened by the threats of a fine in case he were late. Gabriel felt himself very much attracted by this poor priestly musician, who lived so despised in the furthest corner of the church, thinking far more of music ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... wait till he is drowning and then it will be time enough to learn how to swim. Would any sane man give such an advice to an aspirant of the fine arts? What would be thought of the man who would say—"If you wish to become a good musician neglect to learn the scales till you come to your twenty-fifth year; or if it is your ambition to be a great painter, permit a quarter of a century to roll over your head before you learn how to hold the palette or mix the paints." ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... sculptor, with his insight, acquiesces, so this man need not pity him. The musician fares even worse. After his life's labours, they say (even his friends say) that the opera is great in intention, but fashions change so quickly in music—he is out-of-date. He gave his ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... I ever heard of! She does a lot of things well,—takes cups in golf tournaments and is the nimblest hand at tennis you ever saw. Also, she’s a fine musician and plays ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... sparse but heavy furniture, the piano, the violin, the flute, the book-lined walls, and the absence of every sort of curtain, cushion, or knickknack. 'Here lived a plain man,' they'd say; 'a scholar, a musician, stern, unloved and ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... government, navigation, gunnery, painting, sculpture, and the rest; because the fundamental facts—say of music—cannot even attract attention until some music has been produced by the art of some musician, crude though that art may be; and the art cannot advance very far until scientific methods have been applied, and the principles that govern the production of good music have been found. The unskilled ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... gingham was scrupulously clean, and he had the uncommon refinement of a collar and necktie. Out of sight herself, Lyddy drew near enough to hear; and this she did every night without recognising that the musician was blind. The music had a curious effect upon her. It was a hitherto unknown influence in her life, and it interpreted her, so to speak, to herself. As she sat on the bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree, her ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... exclusively PSYCHOLOGICAL for one to be content with it alone....The musical sense implies the intelligence....The theory...applies to a great number of sonorous sensations, and not at all to any musical perceptions." Mr. W.H. Hadow tells us that it is the duty of the musician not to flatter the sense with an empty compliment of sound, but to reach through sensation to the mental faculties within. And again we read "the art of the composer is in a sense the discovery and exposition ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... have in this conception as perfect an instance as we require of the lowest supposable phase of immodest or licentious art in music; the "inner consciousness of good" being dim, even in the musician and his audience, and wholly unsympathized with, and unacknowledged by the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic and cosmic powers. This represented scene came into my mind suddenly one evening, a few weeks ago, in contrast ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... curious comfort from the story of the reviewer for a Boston journal who once described a musician as remaining seated through a concert in the pensive attitude of Buddha contemplating his navel. It is a story within whose implications lies all that has ever been said, or ever will be said, about censorship. The ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... West. They were without religion, 'of the horse, horsey,' and notorious thieves. In this they agree with the European Gipsy. But they are not habitual eaters of mullo balor, or 'dead pork;' they do not devour everything like dogs. We cannot ascertain that the Jat is specially a musician, a dancer, a mat and basket-maker, a rope-dancer, a bear-leader, or a pedlar. We do not know whether they are peculiar in India among the Indians for keeping their hair unchanged to old age, as do pure-blood English Gipsies. All of these things ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... he said drily. "As for money, I might have had plenty by this time, if I had not run away from home when I was a boy, because I preferred being a poor musician to a rich merchant. Money is not the only nor the best thing in the ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... other music are; though, indeed, some say the bass is the ground of music. And, for my part, I care not at all for that profession that begins not in heaviness of mind. 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, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... fifteenth verse they came to the town of Tooraloo, and that put a stop to the singing, because you can't sing in the public streets unless you are a musician or a nuisance. The town of Tooraloo is one of those dozing, snoozing, sausage-shaped places where all the people who aren't asleep are only half awake, and where dogs pass away their lives on the footpaths, and you fall over cows when taking ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... was a room which shone with gold, mirrors, flowers, silks, and lace; a small music-room, where were a harp and pianos (Saint Remy was an excellent musician), a cabinet of pictures and curiosities the boudoir communicating with the green-house, a dining-room, a bathing-room, and a small library. It is useless to say that all these rooms, furnished with exquisite taste, had for ornaments some Watteaus but little known, some Bouchers unheard ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... Stradivarius, so fragile, so delicate and slim, were as four chains to bind the people to him; four living wires over which the sound of his fame sped from city to city, from province to province, until there was no musician in all the Russias who could play as Velasco, no instrument like his with the gift of tears and of laughter as well, all the range of human emotions hidden within its slender, ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... for its body, we for its mind. But their work is more showy than ours and attracts more attention; and to attract attention is the aim and object of most of us. But for Bohemians to worry among themselves which is the greatest, is utterly without reason. The story-teller, the musician, the artist, the clown, we are members of a sharing troupe; one, with the ambition of the fat boy in Pickwick, makes the people's flesh creep; another makes them hold their sides with laughter. The tragedian, soliloquising on his crimes, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... was Honora's soul played upon by the unknown musician of the sleepless hours. Now a mad, ecstatic chorus dinned in her ears and set her blood coursing; and again despair seized her with a dirge. Periods of semiconsciousness only came to her, and from one of these she was suddenly startled into wakefulness by her own words. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... just seated at table, and the waiters were bringing in the first course. Twenty-five persons sat at the Christmas board, at one end of which sat the captain as host with his wife and little Jennie at his left. At his right sat the young musician, who had entertained us at the Mission several times with his singing, and the storekeeper, but with a place between them ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... times I have run to the window expecting to see some poor creature in the agonies of death, but found, to my surprise, that it was only an old woman crying 'Fardin' apples,' or something of the kind. Hogarth's picture of the enraged musician will give you an excellent idea of the noise I hear every day under ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... The figure of this musician, at the congress of Welsh fairies, was the most comical of any in the company. The saying that he was popular with all the mountain spirits was shown to be true, the moment he began to scrape his fiddle, for then they all crowded ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... standing on its handle, and drinking stiffly a cup of wine. You see upon the wall near by, with sympathy, a patient being plied by a naked and evidently an unyielding physician with medicine from a jar that might have been visited by Morgiana, a musician playing upon an instrument like a huge and stringless harp. But it is the happy tomb of Thi that lingers in your memory. In that tomb one sees proclaimed with a marvellous ingenuity and expressiveness the joy and the activity of life. Thi must have loved life; ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... duty is not to be beautiful, but to be pleasing, and she encountered so many women who pleased without beauty that she began to feel that she had discovered her mission. She had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming manners. Mrs. Tristram, then, undertook to be exquisitely ...
— The American • Henry James
... names more perfect than their men. A new song is better to him than a new jacket, especially if bawdy, which he calls merry; and hates naturally the puritan, as an enemy to this mirth. A country wedding and Whitsun-ale are the two main places he domineers in, where he goes for a musician, and overlooks the bag-pipe. The rest of him is drunk, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Hase-Hime was a skilled musician though so young, and often astonished her masters by her wonderful memory and talent. On this momentous occasion she played well. But Princess Terute, her step-mother, who was a lazy woman and never took the trouble to practice daily, broke down in her accompaniment and had to request one ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... (Mr. Berenson finds but nine paintings that may pass as his in all Europe) there is but one example in the Uffizi, and that is unfinished. It is the Adoration of the Magi (1252), scarcely more than a shadow, begun in 1478. Leonardo was a wanderer all his life, an engineer, a musician, a sculptor, an architect, a mathematician, as well as a painter. This Adoration is the only work of his left in Tuscany, and there are but three other paintings from his hand in all Italy. Of these, the fresco of the Last Supper, at Milan, has been ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... mists Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes {58} And phantoms from the crags and solid earth As fast as a musician scatters ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... modest, steadfast Stella Grayland had struck Enfield as the reverse of Cora Brainard, and he found the secret of the salient difference in the fact that Stella had had a thorough training in one direction. Her father was a musician, and his daughter had inherited his faculty and cultivated it by assiduous study at home and abroad. Coming away from her, Enfield had reflected how any ennobling pursuit broadens and deepens the whole character, as a journey up the latitudes on any side of the world gives one ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... far apart, that not even the possibility of uniting them presents itself. Tell the artist that he should paint without a studio, model, or costumes, and that he should paint five-kopek pictures, and he will say that that is tantamount to abandoning his art, as he understands it. Tell the musician that he should play on the harmonica, and teach the women to sing songs; say to the poet, to the author, that he ought to cast aside his poems and romances, and compose song-books, tales, and stories, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... inclosure round it full of those rural graves where one cannot help thinking the inmates must sleep sounder than anywhere else. Here, as it was very near, they were in the habit of attending, and Chatty, though she was not a great musician, played the organ, as so many young ladies in country places do. When the little green curtain that veiled the organ loft was drawn aside for a moment Dick had a glimpse of her, looking out her music before she began, with a chubby-faced ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... the "Bois de Boulogne" a residence named the Grey House, where there assembled round M. Coessin, the high-priest of a new religion, a number of adepts, such as Lesueur, the musician, Colin, private teacher of chemistry at the school, M. Binet, &c. A report from the prefect of police had signified to the Emperor that the frequenters of the Grey House were connected with the Society of Jesuits. The Emperor was uneasy ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... humbug" amid shouts of laughter, the mother said quietly: "But surely you remember, my dear children, hearing of your Uncle Robert, who was drowned years ago, before any of you were born? He was a great musician. He wanted to give up his life to art, but he was persuaded to take up ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... much like yours when I was a boy," he began his story. "In high school and college I had believed myself an artist. I was a good musician, and I dabbled with painting and literature. I wanted to come back for post-graduate work, though, and something attracted me to science. I had put off studying mathematics until my graduating year, only to find that it fascinated me. And ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... have taken a heart of flint to withstand such pleading. Nancy left the musician and went boldly back to ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... introductory explanation with two remarks, made by the distinguished musician, mechanician, and inventor, Theobald Boehm, of Munich, whose inventions were not limited to the flute which bears his name, but include the initiation of an important change in the modern pianoforte, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... as it was important to know how numerous those pestilent Danes were, and how they were fortified, King Alfred, being a good musician, disguised himself as a gleeman or minstrel, and went, with his harp, to the Danish camp. He played and sang in the very tent of Guthrum, the Danish leader, and entertained the Danes as they caroused. While he seemed to think of nothing but his music, he was watchful of their tents, their arms, their ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... moment. In the olden days war-songs and long ballads were the most usual form of music. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were specially rich in the production of songs that live even now. At that time the greatest gipsy musician was a woman: her name was "Czinka Panna," and she was called the Gipsy Queen. With the change of times the songs are altered too, and now they are mostly lyric. Csardas is the quick form of music, and tho' of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... looking in the direction from whence it came, we saw a thread of smoke curling up from among the trees. The sound of music is always attractive; for, wherever there is music, there is good-humour, or good-will. We passed along a footpath, and had a peep through a break in the hedge, at the musician and his party, when the Oxonian gave us a wink, and told us that if we would follow him we ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... cravats over the chin who had no defects to hide. Moenempanda carried his back stiffly, and no wonder, he had about ten yards of a train carried behind it. About 600 people were present. They kept rank, but not step; were well armed; marimbas and square drums formed the bands, and one musician added his voice: "I have been to Syde" (the Sultan); "I have been to Meereput" (King of Portugal); "I have been to the sea." At a private reception, where he was divested of his train, and had only one umbrella instead of three, I gave him a cloth. The Arabs thought highly ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... from her capability as a musician. In music she was not only an infant prodigy, but very much of a born genius. Her memory for any composition she heard once was unfailingly accurate; her rendition of anything she knew was more ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... Rajputana, who had a blue spot in the middle of her forehead and who solicited contributions for her sisters in affliction; now a certain bearded poet, recently back from the Klondike; now a decayed musician who had been ejected from a young ladies' musical conservatory of Europe because of certain surprising pamphlets on free love, and who had come to San Francisco to introduce the community to the music of Brahms; now a Japanese youth who wore spectacles ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... these horrors of the night the peasants have, here and there, resorted to music. It is naive, pathetic. Where there is a piano it is moved into the school, or garage, or whatever the building may be, and at twilight a nun or a volunteer musician plays quietly, to soothe the men to sleep. In one or two towns a village band, or perhaps a lone cornetist, ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... each some acknowledgment for the service he has rendered the community,—money, a dozen of eggs, a pound of lard, a bit of pork, bread, flour, flax, or salt, &c. He who kills the wolf, and carries the spoils as a trophy in this manner, is accompanied by the musician of the neighbourhood, who marches before him blowing his bagpipe with the force of an ox; behind him is one of the strongest men of the village, with a large bag on each shoulder, who carries the presents, and imitates the cry and ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... man a good cricketer? Practice. What makes a man a good artist, a good sculptor, a good musician? Practice. What makes a man a good linguist, a good stenographer? Practice. What makes a man a good man? Practice. Nothing else. There is nothing capricious about religion. We do not get the soul in different ways, under different laws, from those in which we get ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... in art, and leads to vagueness of meaning, to the perpetuation of personal idiosyncrasies; and while a larger consciousness may be induced from the mind side, positive and overwhelming inspiration will be needed to overcome habitual limitations. A musician must love music itself, as well as its meanings, and a voice cannot be made the best of by one who does not love its music. Self-consciousness represents the stage of work and endeavor where faults are being overcome, power enlarged, and new forms of activity ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... little piece of business, after having rubbed your hands until you have almost deprived them of skin, you tune your violin, which you play like an angel, and you draw from it such delightful strains that your ledger and your cash-box fall to weeping with emotion. I, too, am a musician, and my music is the fair sex. But, alas! women never can be for me other than an adorable inutility, a part of the dream of my life. Your dreams yield you a handsome percentage, as I have sorrowfully experienced; my dreams yield me nothing, and therefore it is that they are ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... gates, there sounded from somewhere near a thin, shaky strain of music, the notes of a concertina played with uncertain hand. The sound seemed to come from within the houses, yet how could that be? Assuredly no one lived under these crazy roofs. The musician was playing 'Home, Sweet Home,' and as Goldthorpe listened it seemed to him that the sound was not stationary. Indeed, it moved; it became more distant, then again the notes sounded more distinctly, and now as if the player were in ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... not always help yielding when a lover pushed her terribly hard, by touching her heart like Shatrunjaya in the matter of his dream. And very few indeed are the women who would not have done the same, for he was a great musician, and a man among men, and very young. And very rare indeed is the woman who is qualified to censure her. For most women keep their wheel upon the track, either because nobody ever tries to make them leave it, or simply for fear, either of ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... 'Preface,' 'Life of Sir Francis Drake,' and the first parts of those of 'Admiral Blake,' and of 'Philip Baretier,' both which he finished the following year. He also wrote an 'Essay on Epitaphs,' and an 'Epitaph on Philips, a Musician,' which was afterwards published with some other pieces of his, in Mrs. Williams's Miscellanies. This Epitaph is so exquisitely beautiful, that I remember even Lord Kames, strangely prejudiced as he was against Dr. Johnson, was compelled to allow it very high praise. It has been ascribed to Mr. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... one by one the professional choir-men got called up for military service, and finally came the turn of the organist and choirmaster himself, he being just inside the limit of age. The organist, besides being a splendid musician, happened to be a skilled mechanic, so he was not sent abroad, but was given a commission, and sent down to Aldershot to superintend the assembling of aircraft engines. By getting up at 5 a.m. on Sundays, he was ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... which she hoped would fall on Rose's devoted head. But, during her talk with Mr. Hammond, some of her anger had cooled down. He had touched on great subjects, and Prissie's soul had responded like a musical instrument to the light and skilled finger of the musician. All her intellectual powers were aroused to their utmost, keenest life during this brief little talk. She found that Hammond could say better and more comprehensive things than even her dear old tutor, Mr. Hayes. Hammond was abreast of the present-day aspect of those things in which Prissie delighted. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Mrs. Thrale of Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Mr. Thrale was a brewer, the founder of the great firm now known as Barclay and Perkins. She was many years younger than he; and, after his death, she married Signor Piozzi, a professional musician of eminence. Johnson, who had been an habitual guest of her husband and her at their villa at Streatham, set the fashion of condemning this second marriage as a disgraceful mesalliance; but it is not very easy to see in what respect ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... see no proofs of such grim paternity written in her countenance: Pilot is more like me than she. Some years after I had broken with the mother, she abandoned her child, and ran away to Italy with a musician or singer. I acknowledged no natural claim on Adele's part to be supported by me, nor do I now acknowledge any, for I am not her father; but hearing that she was quite destitute, I e'en took the poor thing out of the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... she crams into a dozen words. As for those poor countrymen of mine, they are just the people that carry back to Germany all the awful tales of my goings-on. Do you know, there was once a poor devil of a musician who had set my Zwei Grenadiere, and to whom I gave no end of help and advice, when he wanted to make an opera on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which I had treated in one of my books. Now he curses me and all the Jews together, and his name is ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... had informal music in my little blue salon. Baron de Zuylen, Dutch minister, was an excellent musician, also Comte de Beust, the Austrian ambassador. He was a composer. I remember his playing me one day a wedding march he had composed for the marriage of one of the archdukes. It was very descriptive, with bells, ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... dinner, and in good time. I like her very much, and think he has been very lucky. She is not in the vaward of youth, but John is but two or three years my junior. She is pleasing in her manners, and totally free from affectation; a beautiful musician, and willingly exerts her talents in that way; is said to be very learned, but shows none of it. A large fortune is no bad addition to such a ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... The young musician had little chance of redress, his antagonist was a head taller than himself, and, besides, he would not have dared lay down his fiddle to fight, lest it ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... mild, and soft, and sweet. The little gate was open. As he raised the latch he heard the notes of Mr Harding's violoncello from the far end of the garden, and, advancing before the house and across the lawn, he found him playing;—and not without an audience. The musician was seated in a garden-chair just within the summer-house, so as to allow the violoncello which he held between his knees to rest upon the dry stone flooring; before him stood a rough music desk, on which was open a page of that dear ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... little gentlewoman, Philip, and a good musician; but, with such a connection, how can I send any ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... girl who had supported her little sisters since she was fourteen, eagerly used her fine voice for earning money at entertainments held late after her day's work, until exposure and fatigue ruined her health as well as a musician's future; a young man whose music-loving family gave him every possible opportunity, and who produced some charming and even joyous songs during the long struggle with tuberculosis which preceded his death, had made a brave beginning, not only as a teacher of music but as a composer. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... as the musician warmed to her work. Miss Hoag stirred uneasily in her chair. Captain Jethro ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... spiritual taste. Hence it is said, 'If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.' No matter what the object of a taste is, the exercises of it are always agreeable. The painter goes with delight to his picture; the musician to his instrument; the sculptor to his bust; because they have a taste for these pursuits. The same feeling of delight attends the Christian to the exercises of godliness: and this is his language, 'It is a good thing to give thanks, and to draw near to God. O how I love thy law! it is sweeter ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... a decided liking to this jesting Englishman, and thought him much more entertaining than the melancholy French musician. ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... Miss Carol, "she told me that that was her name. I don't know whether I was ever really christened or not, but an English musician in Dresden, one of my mother's friends, called me Carol when I was quite a little mite of a thing because I was always singing, and as that was as good a name as any other, I suppose it stuck ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... snappy: "'Cause there's only two or three jobs that a long-haired image like him could hold down," he says. "I'd call him a musician if he could play 'Bedelia' on a jews'-harp; but he can't, so's he's got to ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with this one which strikes at the very roots of life and the nature of the soul! I had always looked upon spirit as a product of matter. The brain, I thought, secreted the mind, as the liver does the bile. But how can this be when I see mind working from a distance and playing upon matter as a musician might upon a violin? The body does not give rise to the soul, then, but is rather the rough instrument by which the spirit manifests itself. The windmill does not give rise to the wind, but only indicates it. It was opposed to my whole habit of thought, ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Antigenidas, a famous musician of the first half of the fourth century B.C. Others attribute the grievance to his pupil Ismenias. This story is also told by Dio ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... the work of a young musician, ambitious to seize his opportunity. After stating its theme largely, simply, in sixteen strong chords, it broke into variations in which the audience for a few moments might read nothing but cacophonous noise, until a gateway opened in the old wall, ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Let's have a lively song now for variety," and the musician struck up a coon song, which they sang lustily. Then followed "America," "Auld Lang Syne," and "'Mid Pleasures and Palaces," the dear old "Home, Sweet Home" coming with intense sweetness and pathos ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... music, and, to this extent, at least, they are as dependent as the poorest; but they are quite sure that the great composers have no message for the poor. There is difficult music, of course, which only the scholarly musician can appreciate; but much of the very best music, if we once have a chance to become familiar with it, appeals to all of us. Then the artistic temperament is not a matter of either condition or race, as one of our young American musicians has pointed out. Lecturing ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... each ear. Like the rest, his face is daubed with white paint; his drum, which he thumps incessantly with a single stick, being manufactured from a hollow tree. Both ends of it are covered with rawhide, and the whole instrument is painted yellow. We recognize easily in this musician the head of ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... perplexity. It was not always safe, he says, to listen to the glowing man when he allowed his imagination to run away with him, but the first burst was of inspiration divine.[48] Painters found his suggestions as potent and as hopeful as the musician found them. He delighted in being able to tell an artist how he might change his bad picture into a good one.[49] "Chardin, La Grenee, Greuze, and others," says Diderot, "have assured me (and artists are not given to flattering ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... more than is to be obtained by building strictly upon its lines, a man of ability may become a great writer or speaker, a statesman, a lawyer, a man of science, painter, sculptor, architect, or musician. That even development of all a man's faculties, which is what properly constitutes culture, may be effected by such an education, while it opens the way for the indefinite strengthening of any special capabilities with which ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... both conventional successes. I was an utterly devastating debutante and you were a prosperous musician ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Therese. My father, a poor clerk in the Institute of Bologna, had let an apartment in his house to the celebrated Salimberi, a castrato, and a delightful musician. He was young and handsome, he became attached to me, and I felt flattered by his affection and by the praise he lavished upon me. I was only twelve years of age; he proposed to teach me music, and finding that I had a fine voice, he cultivated it carefully, and in less than ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... good musician, was delighted, and more anxious to get this than any other of his enemy's treasures. But the giant not being particularly fond of music, the harp had only the effect of lulling him to sleep earlier than usual. As for the wife, she had gone to ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of his being a tale-teller as well as a musician now occurred to me; and as, you know, I like tales of superstition, I begged to have a specimen of his talent as ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... or other, so I degraded him from his office and made him leader of the band—the new one that was to be started. He begged hard, and said he couldn't play—a plausible excuse, but too thin; there wasn't a musician in the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... parents dying early, he was brought up by Symmachus, whom the age agreed to regard as of almost saintly character, and afterwards became his son-in-law. His varied gifts, aided by an excellent education, won for him the reputation of the most accomplished man of his time. He was orator, poet, musician, philosopher. It is his peculiar distinction to have handed on to the Middle Ages the tradition of Greek philosophy by his Latin translations of the works of Aristotle. Called early to a public career, the highest honours of the State came to ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... heart-lightened, she took up a book. It was a new book, she had but half-read, "Gates Ajar." She came to the child eating her ginger snaps in Heaven; to the musician playing favorite airs upon the piano, to the dress-maker fashioning gossamer garments out of aerial fabrics, etc., etc. She ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... of the fountain in the patio, the click of her castanets and the soft swish of her silken saya which seemed to whisper and sigh like a living thing, like the mythical voices of Lilith's hair. Like a musician transposing upon a theme, she introduced new and elaborate motives of her own until, at a sign from her, the music took up the principal theme of ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... principal Italian composers were in flower about the age of twenty-five. There is scarcely an instance of a musician producing his chef-d'oeuvre after the age of thirty. Rossini was not twenty when he composed his Tancredi, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... executive as Susan B. Anthony, spiritual as Lucretia Mott, eloquent as Anna Dickinson, graceful as Celia Burleigh, fascinating as Paulina Wright Davis; a social queen, very domestic, a skillful musician, an excellent cook, very young, and the mother of at least six children; even then she was not entitled to the rights, privileges and immunities of an American citizen. So "the divine rights of the people" became the watchword of thoughtful ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... vessel in which I sailed, among the few passengers, Mrs. and Mr. John Gilbert, a well-known dramatic couple, who were extremely agreeable and genial, the husband abounding in droll reminiscences of the stage; a merry little German musician named Kreutzer, son of the great composer; and a young Englishwoman with a younger brother. I rather doubted the "solidity" of this young lady. By-and-bye it was developed that the captain was in love with her. Out of this, I have heard, came a dreadful ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... attentively while Miss Thrale played on the harpsichord, and with eagerness he called to her, "Why don't you dash away like Burney?" Dr. Burney upon this said to him, "I believe, Sir, we shall make a musician of you at last." Johnson with candid complacency replied, "Sir, I shall be glad to have a new ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... sung in a manner and with an expression that proved him to be an accomplished musician, and in some contrast with the less artful style ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... stayed on at the old man's ranch. There was peace and quiet and appreciation there, such as he had not found in the noisy camps of the cattle kings. No audience in the world could have crowned the work of poet, musician, or artist with more worshipful and unflagging approval than that bestowed upon his efforts by old man Ellison. No visit by a royal personage to a humble woodchopper or peasant could have been received with more flattering thankfulness ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... University education and well grounded in Latin and Greek, and thoroughly acquainted with both English and French literature, for although born a Frenchman, he had been brought up in America. He was also a cultivated musician, and he and Mme. Jacot in the evenings would sing old French songs, Swiss songs, English songs, in their rich full voices; and then if you stole softly out on to the verandah, you would often find it crowded with a ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... nay, the whole world, into a dream—which is felt rather than seen, but possesses a charm that almost defies the pencil of the painter, and can only be expressed by the deep and sweet notes of the poet and the musician. For love and reverence are necessary to appreciate and ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... There are in Manila three printing-houses, and all keep Indian workmen; and the errors that they make are not numerous. They have remarkable skill in music; and there is no village, however small, that has not a very respectable musician to officiate in the church. Among them are excellent voices—trebles, contraltos, tenors, and basses; almost all can play on the harp, and there are many violinists, and players on the oboe and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... lessons, when he was about eight years old, from a friend of the family, Mr. Juan Buitrago, a native of Bogota, Colombia, and an accomplished musician. Mr. Buitrago was greatly interested in the boy, and had asked to be permitted to teach him his notes. Their piano practice at this time was subject to frequent interruptions; for when strict supervision was not exercised over his work, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... the musicians, the physicists, the biologists will get their apparatus for the asking as easily as their bread, or, as at present, their paving, street lighting, and bridges; and the deaf man will not object to contribute to communal flutes when the musician has to contribute to communal ear trumpets. There are cases (for example, radium) in which the demand may be limited to the merest handful of laboratory workers, and in which nevertheless the whole community must pay because the price is beyond the means ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... with the air of a man who has at last an opportunity to show that he can dare all for love. Personally, I have a suspicion that he poured his month's savings at the bandmaster's feet, and begged him to do this thing for the most wonderful lady in the world; or perhaps the bandmaster was really a musician, and his musician's heart was touched—lonely there amid the beef—to think that there was really some one, invisible though she were to him, some shrouded silver presence, up there among the beefeaters, who really loved to hear great ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... specimens, and speak with no authority.[1] Living always in the pine lands, and haunting the dense undergrowth, it is heard a hundred times where it is seen once,—a point greatly in favor of its effectiveness as a musician. Mr. Brewster speaks of it as singing always from an elevated perch, while the birds that I saw in the act of song, a very limited number, were invariably perched low. One that I watched in New Smyrna (one of a small chorus, the others being invisible) sang for a quarter of an hour from a stake ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... had the sunniest nature imaginable, and was always more bright and cheerful than the average girl of her age. "From my knees down," she would say confidentially, "I'm no good; but from my knees up I'm as good as anybody." She was an excellent musician and sang very sweetly; she was especially deft with her needle; she managed her chair so admirably that little assistance was ever required. Mrs. Conant called her "the light of the house," and to hear her merry laughter and ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... "was Ludwig van Beethoven. I was no ordinary musician. The Archduke Rudolph used to speak to me ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to his name" (Heb. 13: 15). This kind of sacrifice costs—earnest prayer, deep communion, and the fullness of the Spirit; but no sum of gold, however large, is adequate for its purchase, nor can any musician's art, however ingenious, imitate it. Is there no approach to the sin of simony in those churches which spend thousands yearly in artistic music? And is not this attempted purchase of the Holy Ghost closely linked with the other sin of robbing God, considering how ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... his native country under pretext of offering sacrifices, but in reality to place himself at the head of the conspirators; how, finally, the indiscretion of a woman revealed the whole plot to a eunuch of the harem, and how he warned Astyages in the middle of his evening banquet by means of a musician or singing-girl, was frequently narrated by the Median bards in their epic poems, and hence the story spread until it reached in later times even as far ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... who recently arrived in this city, is said to be a good poet, a good painter, a good musician, full of wit, anecdotes and pleasantry—it is impossible to pass a ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... perspective and painstakingly carried them into practice. He was also a remarkable sculptor, as is testified by his admirable horses in relief. As an engineer, too, he built a canal in northern Italy and constructed fortifications about Milan. He was a musician and a natural philosopher as well. This many-sided man liked to toy with mechanical devices. One day when Louis XII visited Milan, he was met by a large mechanical lion that roared and then reared itself upon its haunches, displaying upon its breast ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... new faith was founded only on love for a human being, and when Lady Rens, who was intensely passionate and impulsive, suddenly threw all her principles to the winds, and ran away with a Hungarian musician, who had made a furor one season in London by his magnificent violin-playing, her husband, stricken in his soul, and also wounded almost to the death in his pride, abandoned abruptly the religion of the woman who had converted ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... with the excitement of the Italian opera will listen with the fullest, serenest pleasure to the majestic symphonies of Beethoven or to the sublime choruses of Handel. The devotees of the various European schools have none of this catholicity. A very accomplished Italian musician used frankly to say, that a symphony always put him to sleep; and as for the songs of Franz and other recent German composers, he would rather hear the filing of saws with an accompaniment of wet fingers on a window-pane. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... very flat on paper, because it is abstracted from all the circumstances that had set it off to advantage. A writer should recollect that he has only to trust to the immediate impression of words, like a musician who sings without the accompaniment of an instrument. There is nothing to help out, or slubber over, the defects of the voice in the one case, nor of the style in the other. The reader may, if he pleases, get a very good idea of L. H——'s conversation from a very agreeable ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... yourself. Salt junk is the mainstay; a low island, except for cocoanuts, is just the same as a ship at sea: brackish water, no supplies, and very little shelter. The king is a great character - a thorough tyrant, very much of a gentleman, a poet, a musician, a historian, or perhaps rather more a genealogist - it is strange to see him lying in his house among a lot of wives (nominal wives) writing the History of Apemama in an account-book; his description of one of his own songs, which he sang ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when she became acquainted with Alice's musical acquirements, which were, indeed, of no common order, a light broke in upon her. Here was the source of her future independence. Maltravers, it will be remembered, was a musician of consummate skill as well as taste, and Alice's natural talent for the art had advanced her, in the space of months, to a degree of perfection which it cost others—which it had cost even the quick ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... though vague reminiscences of canal-boat travel and woodland camps arose from the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the assurance of such power in the preparation of the whole that we knew her to be merely running over the chords of our appetite with preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had mastered her instrument, and thereafter there was no faltering in her performances, which she varied constantly, through inspiration ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... unhurt, as the natives noticed that the leg was broken. This disappointment brought to his recollection how ineffectual had been some former attempts of his to impress them with an idea of the superior refinement of his followers. Bong-ree, his musician, had annoyed his auditors with his barbarous sounds, and the clumsy exhibition of his Scotch dancers unaccompanied with the aid of music, had been viewed by them ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... diversions, which they wish me to stay and give into, to be sure I should have been glad to have been better qualified to have entertained you with the performances of this or that actor, this or that musician, and the like: but, frightened by the vile plot upon me at a masquerade, I was thrown out of that course of diversion, and indeed into more affecting, more interesting engagements; into the knowledge of a family that had no need to look ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... you," replied Prescott. "It's the musician of the guard—the bugler—who plays the march. It's a strain that is played, the first note beginning just as the reveille gun is fired, at the minute of six in the morning. Then, just five minutes later reveille ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... her friend. So she did the wisest thing she could think of under the circumstances—made the girl go indoors to the piano and play to her. She knew that Rosanne gave, and was given to, by music in a way that is only possible to deep, inarticulate natures such as possess the musician's gift. One had only to listen to her music, thought Kitty, to know that there were depths in her that no woman would ever fathom, though a man might, some day. Denis Harlenden might—if ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... a spot near the bass drum, the Judge stopped and, borrowing the stick from the musician, he rapped sharply on the side ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... Orpheus was a great musician, so skilful that he could tame wild beasts, and even make the trees and rocks move by the sweet melodies which he played. Eurydice was his wife, and one day she trod on a snake, which bit her, so that she died, and went down into the ...
— Evangelists of Art - Picture-Sermons for Children • James Patrick
... she sat down to her tambourine to do crewel work on a tapestry picture. It was a large subject—The bard Ossian playing his harp to Malvino. Ossian seated on the front of some brown rocks, Malvino seated before him, her hands folded across his knees, full of tender regard for the gentle musician. This work was her pastime and recreation. She selected the worsteds and worked her needle out and in, shading and coloring and outlining with the skill of an artist in paints. Three years she worked on this picture, almost to the end of the war, almost as long as Penelope ...
— The Little Immigrant • Eva Stern
... making a long detour the next day to avoid meeting the uncomely old musician on the street and being obliged to recognize him publicly. She lived in perpetual dread of being thus forced, when in the company of Mrs. Draper or Jermain, to acknowledge her connection with him, or with Cousin Parnelia, or with any of the eccentrics ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... The amateur musician or artist has a false complacency in his own very imperfect work only so far as his ear or eye or taste is not yet trained to accurate discrimination; but, as he becomes more accomplished in a fine art, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... our children the strength we have earned in our arms and the wisdom we have acquired in a life of struggle." As well expect the athlete to give them his physical development he has earned in years of exercise. As well expect the musician to give them the technic he has acquired in years of practice. As well expect the scholar to give them the ability to think he has developed in years of study. As well expect Moses to give them his spiritual understanding acquired in a long life ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... and although he gained his living by selling coals from door to door, many persons of the highest station were in the habit of attending the musical meetings held at his house. He was an excellent chemist as well as a good musician, and Thomas Hearne tells us that he left behind him "a valuable collection of musick mostly pricked by himself, which was sold upon his death for near an hundred pounds," "a considerable collection of musical instruments which was sold for fourscore ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... nerves vibrate like strings. Strange, lawless thoughts floated in her mind. The world was meant for love, and passionate sadness, and breaking hearts that healed at the glance of an eye. And as her ear followed the tune, her eyes were drawn with an irresistible movement to the musician. She found him staring at her with a magnetic look ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... the neck bent forward, and the jaw-bone turned sometimes to one side, and sometimes another, they make a thousand different wry faces, to which the dancing lady answers with an astonishing precision. She finishes with gently reclining towards the musician; the sounds of the instrument gradually become weaker; the eyes of the actress are half closed; she gently presses her bosom; every thing expresses violent passion. But it is not possible to give an idea of what now passes, nor the air of indifference with which the ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard |
