Repetitive Listening

This movement is the one you will certainly like the best when you become fully familiar with the suite, for I wrote it with real warmth!
Tchaikovsky in a letter to his patroness

Repetitive Listening
I heard much that had been hidden before. It is like having a flashlight turned on first one place, then another, all the discoveries going to enrich the precious inner store.
Elizabeth Von Herzogenberg to Brahms regarding the G Minor Sextet

Repetitive Listening
Its concealed riches, its many levels of meaning, do not reveal themselves all at once - or at a second or third hearing - even to professional musicians.
Edward Downes, Music Critic, regarding Schumanns Kreisleriana for piano

Repetitive Listening
it should be obvious that one cannot pretend to even begin to know a piece of music on the basis of anything but repeatedly listening to it with full and undivided attention.
Roger Sessions, American Composer, in Questions About Music

Repetitive Listening
a song that is well and artificially made cannot be well perceived nor understood at first hearing, but the oftner you shall heare it, the better cause of liking you will discover: and commonly that song is best esteemed with which our ears are most aquainted.
William Byrd, English Composer preface to Psalms, Songs and Sonnets 1611 A.D.

Repetitive Listening
Leo is fifty-five, a practicing physician. He neither plays nor sings, he cannot read a note - but where is music, there goes Leo on the run. It has not always been thus, with him. When I was forty, he told me, I asked a friend, what is this music you talk about and spend money to hear? The people I like best all go to concerts and come out feeling better than when they went

Repetitive Listening
in. How can I join the club? What is the password and how may I learn it? His friend told him to go to concerts, But not just any concert. Go this way: Choose some special piece, say, the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, and every time you see it on the billboard, go and hear it. And see what happens.

Repetitive Listening
The first time he heard the Fifth Symphony Leo was bored. He was bored the second time, and the third. But he is a persistent fellow, and he went again. This time he recognized a tune. The andante tune, he told me. It was terribly exciting, waiting for the cellos to do that tune. They were beginning to play it, and I knew what was coming nextAnd the fifth time I heard it, I wanted to cry.
Friends and Fiddlers