You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it.
Things aren’t that way…. So when you see anything of mine that you don’t like remember that I’m sincere in doing it and that I’m working toward something. If I write an ugly story that might be hateful to you or to Mother the next one might be one that you would like exceedingly.
-Ernest Hemingway, letter to his father from March 20, 1925, quoted in David Bromwich ‘A Hemingway Surprise‘ The New York Review of Books
‘All I want to say is stay away from what the violin offers easily,’ (Christian Tetzlaff) says. ‘That was always the main preoccupation of the violin schools—Russian or American, for example—to make violin playing easier, to make it perfectly successful and safe, but—from my point of view—utterly uncommunicative.’
Not only do you need to have something to say, you also need the desire to communicate. In other words, you have to make yourself completely understood on an emotional level, though sometimes it looks like communication is not part of a musician’s concern. For Tetzlaff, it’s up to the teachers to believe more in the music than in the violin.
-Jacqueline Vanasse ‘Concert Violinist Christian Tetzlaff’s Advice: Live a Musical Life—Without Armor‘ Strings
The Metal Detector 