Evening in the Palace of Reason Quotes

“As anyone who has ever read a used book knows, nothing exposes readers to quite such a high degree of nakedness as the underlinings and marginalia they live behind...”
― James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason

“Bach’s way of understanding something was to get his hands on it, turn it upside down and backward, and wrestle with it until he found a way to make something new.”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“This world is a great dance in which fools, disguised under the laughable names of Eminence and Highness, think to inflate their being and elevate their baseness. All mortals are equal”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“Unlike his contemporaries Handel and Telemann, whose ambition was directed toward creating the epitome of a particular style, Bach deconstructed styles and put them back together again combined with his strengths in invention, orchestration, and counterpoint.”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“Leibniz memorably defined music as “the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating,”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“In the book Walther finished before Bach arrived, he defined music as “a heavenly-philosophical and specifically mathematical science.”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“Schweitzer had discovered in the organ chorales written during the years in Weimar nothing less than what he called “the lexicon of Bach’s musical speech.”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“With nothing more than gigue [a quick French dance] I can express four important affects: anger or eagerness, pride, simple-minded desire, and flightiness. On the other hand, if I had to set open-hearted and frank words to music, I should choose no species of melody other than the Polish one, the polonaise [ceremonial, processional music].”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“Music is nothing other than the knowledge of the order of all things.”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“music was not so much a reflection or approximation of God’s perfect design but an emanation of the divine Itself.”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“There Are Universal Harmonies of All Six Planets, Similar to Common Four-Part Counterpoint.”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

“Music is a gift and largesse of God, not a human gift.”
― James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment