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)
“The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)
“I was a closet pacifier advocate. So were most of my friends. Unknown to our mothers, we owned thirty or forty of those little suckers that were placed strategically around the house so a cry could be silenced in less than thirty seconds. Even though bottles were boiled, rooms disinfected, and germs fought one on one, no one seemed to care where the pacifier had been.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)