Fragments of an Unknown Teaching is a composition for piano by Canadian composer Peter Hatch.
It was inspired by the work of the Russian mystic philosophers G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. Near the middle of the work, Hatch quotes part of one of Gurdjieff's harmonium improvisations very quietly over a sonorous octave tremolo G played in the low register. While this line is usually played on the piano, in at least one performance (on September 17, 2005, in the Maureen Forrester Recital Hall in Waterloo, Ontario) the harmonium line was played by a harmonium offstage (the composer was present at this performance). The work was commissioned by Terence Kroetsch through the Ontario Arts Council, and was written in 1988.
Famous quotes containing the words fragments of, fragments and/or teaching:
“I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped,
some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and
I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)