This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Music is for the betterment and enrichment of the individual, just as education and reading are. When people come together to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken its longest stride forward since the beginning of time. Music is something to live with always, and children should be taught to regard it as a close and inalienable friend.
Beginning | Children | Civilization | Education | Friend | Individual | Music | People | Play | Reading | Regard | Time | Will | Wisdom |
Although music appeals simply to the emotions, and represents no definite images in itself, we are justified in using any language which may serve to convey to others our musical expressions. Words will often pave the way for the more subtle operations of music, and unlock the treasures which sound alone an rifle, and hence the eternal popularity of song.
Emotions | Eternal | Language | Music | Popularity | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Words |
The Indian... sees his music as indistinct from his dancing and his dancing as indistinct from his worship and his worship as indistinct from his living.
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
The silence in our lives is under assault on all fronts: roaring jets and blasting Walkmans, numbing elevator music and blaring headline news. It’s hard to genuflect to the beat of MTV. We are wired, plugged in, constantly catered to and cajoled. After a while we become terrified out of the silence, unaware of what it has to offer. We drown out the simple question of God with the simplistic sound-bites of man.
God | Man | Music | News | Question | Silence | Sound | Wisdom | God |
Meditation is like a river. It cannot be tamed. It flows and flows and overflows its banks. It is music without sound. It is the silence in which the observer ceases to be immediately he plunges in.
Meditation | Music | Silence | Sound | Wisdom |
No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sound of bells (bells the music highest bordering upon heaven), most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never heard it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelve-month. All I have done or suffered, performed or neglected - in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight of a contemporary, when he exclaimed: “I saw the skirts of the departing year.” It is no more than what is sober sadness, every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking.
Heaven | Indifference | Mind | Music | Past | Sadness | Sound | Time | Wisdom | Worth | Old |
Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
Modern man seems to be afraid of silence. We are conditioned by radio and television on which every minute must be filled with talking, or some kind of sound. We are stimulated by the American philosophy of keeping on the move all the time - busy, busy, busy. This tends to make us shallow. A person's life can be deepened tremendously by periods of silence, used in the constructive ways of meditation and prayer. Great personalities have spent much time in the silence of life.
Life | Life | Man | Meditation | Philosophy | Prayer | Silence | Sound | Talking | Television | Time | Wisdom | Afraid |
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Music | Nothing | Wisdom | Understand |