Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 - 1893

How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject?
It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry...

As the poet Heine said, 'Where words leave off, music begins.'

Peter Tchaikovsky

FRANZ LISZT 1811 - 1886

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

If music has one advantage over the other media through which a person can represent the impressions of the soul, it owes this to its supreme capacity to make each inner impulse audible without the assistance of reason...

Music presents at once the intensity and the expression of feeling. It is the embodied and intelligible essence of feeling, capable of being apprehended by our senses. It permeates them like a dart, like a ray, like a mist, like a spirit, and fills our soul.


Franz Liszt

Claude Debussy 1862-1918

A symphony is usually built on a melody heard by the composer as a child.

The first section is the customary presentation of a theme on which the composer proposes to work; then begins the necessary dismemberment; the second section seems to take place in an experimental laboratory; the third section cheers up a little in a quite childish way, interspersed with deep sentimental phrases during which the melody recedes; but it reappears and the dismemberment goes on..

I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.. .


Claude Debussy