Terry Teachout

“What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone.”

“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.”

“One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.”

“A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself.”

“In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out.”

“I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing 'dumber,' if what you really mean to say is 'less culturally literate.'”

“David Cromer, from Chicago, I think is the most gifted young director in America.”

“As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.”

“The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.”

“At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction.”

“There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative.”

“The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing.”

“I can remember - barely - when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs.”

“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.”

“To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.”

“No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing.”

“Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it.”

“A playwright who limits himself - or is limited - to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray.”

“Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.”

“Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. You don't see it.”