A work of art expresses itself as a balance sheet pitting the spoken against the unspoken.
Russell ShermanTo play the piano is to consort with nature. Every mollusk, galaxy, vapor or viper as well the sweet incense of love's distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist.
Russell ShermanThe breath, prayers, and libido of the fingertip must somehow be transferred to the neutral indifference of the key.
Russell ShermanWhen we play music we describe the echo the tableau of natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by the composer's imagination, which yet must be filtered through our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this tableau, this revelation, we must "hesitate", we must doubt, as the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the construction of being.
Russell ShermanSurely common sense as well as anthropological evidence documents the universal need to pray, to hope, and to lament or carouse through song.
Russell ShermanThe music of the supreme architect, Bach, is filled with pages of discursive argument and rumination, glorifying the nameless whole by a rich embroidery of passages which lead everywhere and nowhere. The ideas are presented, stood on their head, dissolved into fragments, until the ultimate message becomes the connections of all things great and small, a chain of being which cannot be secured until the last note is in place.
Russell Sherman