Bruce Molsky famous quotes

Sometimes when I teach a student something that I think is really simple, I realize I'm teaching them something they can do 90 percent of really easily and the last 10 percent is going to take them 10 years.
-- Bruce Molsky

#Teaching #Simple #Thinking

The way you hold the bow, the way that violinists are trained to produce a note, is really different. I'm not an expert in classical music. I don't want to say something that ends up in print and somebody comes running after me with a shovel, but they're taught for each note to stand alone in a very deliberate kind of way, which is really different than how notes are strung together in old-time music to create rhythm.
-- Bruce Molsky

#Running #Together #Experts

I've kind of codified certain things for myself, rhythmic patterns and mechanical ways of using the bow to create layers of rhythm. What I'm trying to do is to create a complete piece of music on one instrument.
-- Bruce Molsky

#Trying #Pieces #Patterns

There are things about how a note sounds on a violin that are really analogous to the human voice - you have a frequency and the air, and then you have a timbre which really is overtones - and making those things work together is one thing. The other thing is mechanical: If you can use your hands and arms to create sound on a fiddle, then learning to sing with it is like adding a third body part. And it's all training.
-- Bruce Molsky

#Air #Hands #Voice

My grandfather and my dad's brothers and my dad all worked in construction. It's the whole cultural thing, you know, your parents want you to go to the next level of whatever, and I decided that I ought to be an architect. I can't tell you why. And I tried, and I had no aptitude for it.
-- Bruce Molsky

#Brother #Dad #Parent

Strength doesn't come from what you do, strength is from who you are.
-- Bruce Molsky

#Who You Are

There are people that appreciate the music for its musical value and there are people that will always think that it should be reserved as an expression for people who grew up with it.
-- Bruce Molsky

#Thinking #Expression #People

Fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing.

He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.

Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.

One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily, and loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight, and people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted, unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers, unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea, and work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying, and play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling, and the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder or care or notice, and people will smile without reason, even in winter, even in the rain.

Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

Think it over, think it under.

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.