Susan

“The story that results is often a disheartening one. Though the various parts of rural America differ in important ways, as a whole, they are weighed down by their struggles: resource economies where powerful interests extracted wealth and left the people who toiled to remove it with little or nothing to show for their decades of labor; manufacturing jobs that fled overseas; inadequate healthcare and physical infrastructure; limited opportunities that push talented young people to leave; and much more. And all this exists within a landscape of political emptiness in which a lack of real competition leaves Democrats believing there’s no point in trying to win rural votes and Republicans knowing they can win those votes without even trying—and give the people who supply them nothing in return. We”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Music is for everyone. It’s not—or at least shouldn’t be—an elitist, aristocratic club that you need a membership card to appreciate: it’s a language, it’s a means of connecting us that is beyond color, beyond race, beyond the shape of your face or the size of your stock portfolio. Musicians of color, however, are severely underrepresented in the classical music world—and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. Look up the statistics: 1.8 percent of musicians performing in classical symphonies are Black; 12 percent are people of color. But for me, day to day, performance by performance, it wasn’t about being a statistic: it was about trying to live my life and play the music that I loved, and often being”
― Brendan Slocumb, The Violin Conspiracy

“Precision and technique can be learned,” she told him. “That’s just practice. A lot of practice, but it’s still just practice. What we can’t teach is how to make a musician actually connect—emotionally connect—with the pieces he’s playing. To really care about the music, and let the music tell its story.”
― Brendan Slocumb, The Violin Conspiracy

“Buy an atlas and keep it by the bed—remember you can go anywhere.”
― Joanna Lumley