Music

If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured and far away.  Petrus Macinnius
— Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862).

Those really were two unforgettable hours. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to concentrate so well on my problems with arsenophenylglycine. We’ll have to make a small substitution the first thing tomorrow.
— Paul Ehrlich (1854 – 1915), to his wife as they left the concert hall. (New Scientist 22 August 1985, 48).

Almost anything that an animal can employ to make a sound is put to use. Drumming, created by beating the feet, is used by prairie hens, rabbits and mice; the head is banged by woodpeckers and certain other birds; the males of deathwatch beetles make a rapid ticking sound by percussion of a protuberance on the abdomen against the ground …Fish make sounds by clicking their teeth, blowing air, and drumming with special muscles against tuned inflated air bladders.
— Lewis Thomas, (1913 – 1993), ‘Music of This Sphere’ in The Lives of a Cell, Penguin, 1978.

Mathematics and music! The most glaring possible opposites of human thought! Yet connected, mutually sustained!
— Hermann von Helmholtz, quoted by Martin Gardner, Scientific American, December 1974.

Born in Warsaw in 1838 and died there in 1861, aged twenty-three. In this brief lifetime she accomplished, perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilized world with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could play. It is probable that if the market stalls and back-street music shops of Britain were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer would be found to be still selling, and as for the Empire at large, Messrs. Allan of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years after the death of the composer, that their house alone was still disposing of 10,000 copies a year.
— Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th edition, 1955, 64.

A tone-deaf old person from Tring
When somebody asked him to sing,
            Replied, “It is odd
            But I cannot tell ‘God
Save the Weasel’ from ‘Pop Goes the King’”.
— anon in W. S. Baring-Gould, The Lure of the Limerick, 181.

A house in the Adelphi development was indeed a wonderful place for a man of means to live. The Adam brothers had designed them, and imported Scottish labourers, kept content by having bagpipes played to them, had built them.
— Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World, 207.

Blow, bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892).

Music has a very happy effect in relieving the mind when fatigued with study. It would be well if every studious person were so far acquainted with that science as to amuse himself after severe. thought, by playing such airs as have a tendency to raise the spirits, and inspire cheerfulness and good humour.
— William Buchan, Domestic Medicine, 1790, 60.

When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822), When the Lamp is Shattered.

A very important principle associated with the name of Christian Doppler (1803-53) was introduced in 1842. According to ‘Doppler’s Principle’ the movement of a spectrum-yielding body or part of a body can be measured by the shifting of the lines in its spectrum. This has rendered possible the estimation of the sun’s rotation rate and also of the rate of approach and recession towards or away from us of various stars.
— Charles Singer, A Short History of Scientific Ideas, Oxford University Press, 1959.

There were the doctors with their medicine shows: steam doctors, magnetic doctors, hydrological doctors, milk-sick doctors, homeopaths, vitopaths, mesmerists, baunscheidtists and sellers of patent medicines. They traveled with musicians and actors, who'd sing and put on burlesque routines to draw the crowd, and once they'd made their sales, they'd be back on the river again before anybody had a chance to examine the contents of the bottles they'd just bought.
— Lee Sandlin, Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, 16.

It is probably true that the height of early twentieth-century experimentation has been passed. A vast number of new styles and methods have been tried, and some of them have been kept and some discarded. We have probably come to the time when composers have sampled enough of the new systems to have found what has served their purposes, and what is useless to them. They have absorbed into their own techniques various of the new devices and have become accustomed to using them. And since they are no longer new toys, they have learned how to use them with discretion and taste. And as pure experimentation passes, true creativeness steps in, and art takes the place of science.
— John Tasker Howard and James Lyons, Modern Music, Mentor Books, 1957, 133.

CAROLINE, sister of William, was trained by him as a singer in the Bath days and had considerable success in Handel’s oratorios under her brother’s conductorship. (The method of training adopted was for her to sing the violin parts of concertos with a gag in her mouth.) It was with great reluctance that she dropped music to be trained as an assistant astronomer, yet she made discoveries — eight minor planets, one of them named after her.
— Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th edition, 1955, 470.

MISS HARDCASTLE: Women and music should never be dated.
— Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774) She Stoops to Conquer (Act 3).

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