“Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Scattered among these things are reminders that sound once existed: a metronome, a drumming pad, a guitar pick, a trumpet mouthpiece, a music stand, a tuning fork, a block of rosin...The older instruments bear the marks of those who have already played them, the scuffs and bites and dents that are the mysterious scars of sound. In their midst the… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share
“To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive...After all these procedures the unbreachable mysteriousness of music remains intact. The… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share
“Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room...An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share
“The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share Image
“No season lives here. This space has quite successfully shut out any such interference. The cunning designer saw to it that there is not… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share Image
“The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share Image
“I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Sound is the most absorbent medium of all, soaking up histories and philosophical systems and physical surroundings and encoding them in something so slight… — Geoffrey O'Brien Copy Share Image
