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In just a few minutes music can change your day, ... thus your life.




Excerpt: In 1890, when Johannes Brahms turned 57, he told a friend that his career as a composer was probably over, that he’d done enough. The next year, he wrote his will.


But before he died, in 1897, he had a final burst of creativity, including writing four sets of short pieces for solo piano.


They contain introverted, quiet, thoughtful music. Brahms called a lot of these little pieces intermezzos — suggesting that he was just having a brief word with the listener between grander statements.


This one, though, he called a romance: a tender, intimate song without words. Listen to the whole thing.


Then listen to this moment, to the lines in the pianist’s two hands — the melody, higher up, in the right hand, and that calm, regular flow of notes in the left:

Listen to the second section, which Brahms put in a different key for a different mood — swifter, airier, perhaps a memory of a freer time:


Listen to the way that the pianist trills — making a sound that’s like quivering — to get from that second section back to the music from the beginning:

Do you hear the return of that original music in a new way after the contrasting middle section?


With Brahms, at the end of the 19th century, there is often a sense of lateness, or maybe a better word is afterness. His music gives the feeling that he thought he was living and working long beyond the time of true greatness, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.

 
 

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One  objective:
facilitating  those,
who are so motivated,
to enjoy the benefits of becoming  humble polymaths.   

“The universe
is full of magical things
patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”


—Eden Phillpotts

Four wooden chairs arranged in a circle outdoors in a natural setting, surrounded by tall

To inquire, comment, or

for more information:

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”

―Vincent Van Gogh

" The unexamined life is not worth living."  

Attributed to Socrates​

“Who knows whether in a couple of centuries

there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance?”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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