I was tagged by the Mun.
The rules of the meme:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
The nearest book? Paul Griffiths's Penguin Companion to Classical Music, which Joseph Kerman says in the current edition of the New York Review of Books ($$), "belongs in every musician's library."*
"Leopold Nowak, in charge of the new collected edition insituted in 1951, preferred to treat the versions as separate entities. But many questions remain about the quality of Bruckner's investment in his own and his friends' second, third, and fourth thoughts. His music, seemingly so confident, so firm, is ringed with doubt."
Bonus fourth sentence:
"Pfitzner seems to have been responsible for the view that he wrote the same symphony over and over again, and indeed there were models of sound and structure to which he was repeatedly drawn: the soft, tremulous opening over which an extended melody launches itself, in a return visit to the place where Beethoven's Ninth begins; the ostinato, whether used to make a static background or, in the characteristically bounding scherzo, to generate a corporeal rhythmic energy; the solemn adagio; the orchestration in distinct layers, with no unusual instruments except the Wagner tubas added from No. 7 onwards; the interruption of silence, within which the music seems to reverberate within the space it is creating; the climactic contrapuntal superposing of themes; the chromaticism, an effortless link from the Renaissance to the world of Schoenberg."
Bonus bonus quotation here, from the book's preface, which should be read and reread by every musician.
I tag Bryant Manning, Zac Thompson, Scott Smith, Michael Miner, Whet Moser, and Molly Sheridan. Six people, because I cheated with extra quotations. Deal.
*Luckily for this post, this book was two inches closer than Using Microsoft Office Excel 2007: Special Edition.