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, unknown and/or teaching:
“Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,—is not that mine? His wit,—if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.”
—Allan Bloom (1930–1992)
“So that this beautiful realm of hers was held in her mind extended, or lengthened: it had been finite, bounded, known utterly and in every detail, self-enclosed ... but now it lapped and rippled out and upwards beyond there into hinterlands that were like unknown possibilities in her own mind.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“What is this? A new teaching -with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 1:27.
Of Jesus after he had exorcized an unclean spirit.