Time To Play

I want to sing of my inner visions with the naive candor of a child.

Claude Debussy
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Debussy (1862 - 1918) was a French composer and when he started writing music the world changed. He inherited all the music which had been written up to that time, culminating in the Late Romantic traditions and pulled it all apart. He knocked down the pile of rocks which had been the rules of harmony, he cut up melodies with his imaginary scissors and stuck mental wedges into the ideas of rhythm. What he did was to open the curtain on modern music. And yet all the time he was writing beautiful music, because he was listening to his inner song. And he went to work with a childlike trust in that song.

Musicians are children who take a stick and bang on a can, or stretch a rubber band and listen to it twang, who whistle or sing.

Poets are children who fall in love with words like "murmur," "spoon" and "click."

Painters are children who take crayons and make designs everywhere or who dip into finger paints and push it around on a piece of paper.

Architects are children who put twigs together in the back yard or who pile stones on each other.

Potters are children who play in the mud.

Writers are children who make up stories.

Actors are children who tie towels to their backs and pretend they are superman.

Dancers are children who skip and spin when they hear music.

As George Bernard Shaw put it "We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing."

May you never lose your childhood.

DB
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Brian is back.