I think I’ve managed to read all of Robertson Davies novels. And I’ve certainly loved them. Alex Ross has a quote from the The Lyre of Orpheus, one of my favorites. (Read the whole Cornish Trilogy. Great stuff.)

I’ve put up Robertson Davies quotes in the past. Here’s what I’ve shared:

Mrs. Gilmartin smiled, and suddenly I saw what may have drawn her and her husband together; they had been united by music, that siren who makes so many bad matches.

No, it’s the musicians and I must say they are an accomplished bunch, but odd, as musicians tend to be. Is it the vibration from their instruments, do you suppose, working on the brain? All that fraught buzzing?

To this day I am indulgent toward orchestras that are trying to lift themselves in the world, while critics are busy assuring them that they are not the Vienna Philharmonic and never will be.

We both work hard like stink from Friday through Sat., preparing the goodies, which I must say are pretty lavish?scones with jam and whipped cream are a popular item and cucumber sandwiches by the hod. Because they eat like refugees, being musicians mostly ….
We seem to specialize in musicians because they are really the most clubbable of the artistic community here ….
Why musicians? It just happens but I suppose there is some deep reason for it. The painters are a very special lot and feel themselves beleaguered because they are trying to drag Toronto taste into the twentieth century and it’s an uphill pull. Sculptors hardly to be found; no call for it except effigies of dead politicians and they are getting very expensive (bronze, of course) and are generally farmed out to somebody in Montreal who specializes in that sort of thing and does it from photographs. Writers?well, we’ve tried with writers but no go; they are so quarrelsome, and they expect booze, which we can’t run to. Certainly not the way writers guzzle it. So it’s musicians, chiefly.

-all of these are from The Cunning Man

I am continuing to read, very slowly, Alex Ross’s book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, and I continue to be impressed. In a major way.