Fairfax Music: "In The Tradition & Beyond"

04/28/2025

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
“… lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”
- Wassily Kandinsky

04/28/2025

“Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.”
- Vincent van Gogh
“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
- Oliver Sacks

04/25/2025

“There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.”
- John Keats
“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
- Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings

04/23/2025

“By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet
did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
but music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
and his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”
- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

04/23/2025

“Life without playing music is inconceivable for me. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music, I get most joy in life out of music.”
- Albert Einstein
“He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.”
- E.M. Forster

04/22/2025

“Music is energy, emotion, expression, escapism, enlightenment. Music is so much more than just entertainment.”
- Rasheed Ogunlaru
“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”
- Henry David Thoreau

04/21/2025

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”
― James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues

04/18/2025

“And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right....”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.

04/16/2025

“This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.”
- Leonard Bernstein
“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”
- Plato, The Republic
“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music. ”
- Marcel Marceau
“Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.”
- Benjamin Disraeli

04/14/2025

This is my latest musical project on a tune that I wrote and dedicated to the love of my life 48 years ago. It turned out to be 10 renditions, each somewhat unique, all performed beautifully by The Automata Africanus Strings and The Automata Africanus Chamber Orchestra. I hope that you'll view the videos, listen and enjoy, as much as I enjoyed putting it together. 😊

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04/11/2025

“The music of a civilization has far-reaching consequences on consciousness and, thus, influences the basic nature of a society. Music and its rhythms divert and compel the awareness, describing the limits within which a consciousness, thus fascinated, may operate.
Control the music, then, and you own a powerful tool with which to shape the society.
―The Dosadi Analysis, BuSab Documents”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

04/09/2025

04/04/2025

Reflecting on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s courageous leadership on the eve of his martyrdom 57 years ago.

a choral work with text & visualization by Richard Fairfaxhttp://www.fairfaxmusic.org/store/c9/The_MLK_Series.html