"Virtuosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... manager to the last detail in boyish effects, there was that about him which defied long-haired precedent. Slimly and straightly he had shot up into an unmannered, a short, even a bristly-haired young manhood, disqualifying by a close shave for the older school of hirsute virtuosity. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... point which is, that on the pianola nothing is difficult, that with this modern instrument the question of difficulty entirely disappears, and that the most hair-raising, breath-catching exploits of virtuosity are as easy for the pianolist as the most commonplace five-finger exercises are for the pianist. In other words, the pianolist can approach music from a wholly new standpoint. For him music exists simply as music. Its history, its evolution, which latter after all is a matter ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... happily harmonised with breadth of ensemble and effectiveness of design. Some five years later this fine achievement was followed by the even more striking, if rather less dignified, "Sir John Sinclair," a splendid piece of virtuosity, which unites brilliant colour and admirable tone to great dash and ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... another. Mary was in the embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions; she was looking up at him, talking, as Denis could see, very seriously. What about? he wondered. The Malthusian League, perhaps. Seated in the corner among the band, Jenny was performing wonders of virtuosity upon the drums. Her eyes shone, she smiled to herself. A whole subterranean life seemed to be expressing itself in those loud rat-tats, those long rolls and flourishes of drumming. Looking at her, Denis ruefully ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... through consistently, is far from representing mediaeval art in its full and ideal essence; it is rather an incidental achievement, a sport in which an adventitious interest is, for a moment, emphasised overwhelmingly. Intelligence here comes to the fore, and a sort of mathematical virtuosity: but it was not mathematical virtuosity nor even intelligence to which, in Christian art, the leading role properly belonged. What structural elucidation did for church architecture was much like what scholastic elucidation did for church dogma: it insinuated a logic into the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... extravagance. "The period" (I am again quoting Holbrook Jackson) "was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity on the one hand, and a militant commercial movement on the other.... The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of many of the younger poets was minor because it was little more than a pose—not because it was erotic.... It was a passing ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... the door, flanked by two palms in pots, executed suddenly all by itself a valse tune with aggressive virtuosity. The din it raised was deafening. When it ceased, as abruptly as it had started, the be-spectacled, dingy little man who faced Ossipon behind a heavy glass mug full of beer emitted calmly what had the sound of a ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... reminiscence of the Wagnerian school of shepherds. This is one of a series of "Moon Pictures" for four hands, based on Hans Christian Andersen's lore. Two concertos for piano and orchestra are dazzling feats of virtuosity; one of them is reviewed at length in A.J. Goodrich' book, "Musical Analysis." He has written also a book of artistic moment called "Twelve Virtuoso-Studies," and two books of ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... out of hiding and picked up their play; the frightened Ophelia came out of Nan's cabin across the street and went her way; a lanky negro youth in blue coat and pin-striped trousers appeared, coming down the squalid thoroughfare whistling the "Memphis Blues" with bird-like virtuosity. The lightness with which Niggertown accepted the moral side glance of a ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... of subtle and noble simplicity, in his two greatest extant pieces of portraiture—the Morett of Dresden and the Duchess of Milan, now in our National Gallery. But in technical powers, and the power of subordinating their very virtuosity to the requirement of a true picture, this was a superlative expression ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... Heine's love poems—two-thirds of the Book of Songs—are written in the very simplest of verses, mostly quatrains of easy and seemingly inevitable structure. Heine learned the art of making them from the Magic Horn, from Uhland, and from Eichendorff, and he carried the art to the highest pitch of virtuosity. They are the forms of the German Folk-song, a fit vehicle for homely sentiments and those elemental passions which come and go like the tide in a humble heart, because the humble heart is single and yields unresistingly to their flow. But Heine's heart was not single, his passion ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... nature, like nature recovered and restored. Unlike all previous musicians, there is nothing bombastic about him; for the former did not mind playing at times with their art, and making an exhibition of their virtuosity. One associates Wagner's art neither with interest nor with diversion, nor with Wagner himself and art in general. All one is conscious of is of the great necessity of it all. No one will ever be able to ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... anyone who ever held pencil. Beardsley's precocity was simply marvellous. He seemed to have an intuitive understanding not only of his own art but of every art and craft, and it was some time before one realised that he attained this miraculous virtuosity by an absolute disdain for every other form of human endeavour. He knew nothing of the great general or millionaire or man of science, and he cared as little for them as for fishermen or 'bus-drivers. The current of his talent ran narrow between stone ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... privileges, must increase the suggestibility of the untrained mind and reenforce powerfully the suggestive energy of the proposition to buy. The whole technique of this procedure has nowhere been brought to such virtuosity as in our country. The fact which we mentioned, that the new industrial and mining enterprises can offer shares small enough to be accessible to the man without means, has evidently been the chief reason for developing ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... astonishment but with a sort of dismal wonder. I don't want to talk disrespectfully of any pages of mine. Psychologically there were no doubt good reasons for my attempt; and it was worth while, if only to see of what excesses I was capable in that sort of virtuosity. In this connection I should like to confess my surprise on finding that notwithstanding all its apparatus of analysis the story consists for the most part of physical impressions; impressions of sound and sight, railway station, streets, a trotting horse, ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... discovery, had desired her with a passion that, uncircumvented, would have swept him on to love and a life on which his laboriously acquired technique of villainy would have been wasted, so it had been the problem set his virtuosity to create a situation which would let him fulfil his body's hunger for her and at the same time kill for ever all possibility of love between them. She could imagine him seated under the little window in the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West |
