I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people. – Terry Teachout
You don’t have to know anything about the Shakers to appreciate Mr. Copland’s score for ‘Appalachian Spring’ any more than you have to know who William Randolph Hearst was to understand ‘Citizen Kane.’ – Terry Teachout
It may well be, of course, that America’s pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don’t think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art. – Terry Teachout
Maine likes to call itself ‘America’s Vacationland.’ For many artists, though, it’s the office. Since the 19th century, painters from all over the country – including Edward Hopper, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver and Andrew Wyeth – have spent large chunks of time there. – Terry Teachout
Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood. – Terry Teachout
Ai Weiwei, who is both a widely admired conceptual artist and a fearless human-rights activist, has been on the bad side of the Chinese government for years. – Terry Teachout
The ‘Podunk Times’ is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There’s just not enough dance there. – Terry Teachout
Nowadays, most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch ‘Breaking Bad’ as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play – assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet. – Terry Teachout
I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz. – Terry Teachout
I suspect that most playgoers don’t understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings. – Terry Teachout
Not surprisingly, my parents’ generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn’t do us any good from a cultural point of view. I’m struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age. – Terry Teachout
Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement. – Terry Teachout
Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I’d issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called ‘The American Experience in Art.’ – Terry Teachout
In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men’s skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are. – Terry Teachout
Anna Deavere Smith’s new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that ‘Let Me Down Easy’ is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying. – Terry Teachout
The smaller newspapers probably won’t have any critics at all. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing because there’s a certain level of seriousness that you can’t get with a small newspaper for critics. – Terry Teachout
Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible. – Terry Teachout
Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You’ll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We’re too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood. – Terry Teachout
It’s said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black and white. If this is so, I suspect it’s because such films portray an America that no longer exists. – Terry Teachout
No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit. – Terry Teachout
Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher. – Terry Teachout
Most ‘Monty Python’ fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age. – Terry Teachout
Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree. – Terry Teachout
Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets. – Terry Teachout
I don’t know anybody in the opera business who isn’t worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock. – Terry Teachout
Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere. – Terry Teachout