I am beginning work on Hanns Eisler’s Sonatine! I am really looking forward to performing music by this great, underappreciated composer.

From the North American Hanns Eisler Forum Website

“Someone who knows only music, understands nothing about it.”

Some composers may have tried to escape the upheavals of their century through the illusion of “pure music,” but not Hanns Eisler. His lifelong conviction was that music should not be subjective but objective, not obscure but transparent, not metaphysical but grounded in history. Eisler’s art held up a mirror to the revolutionary hopes and bitter disappontments of his generation—a generation that witnessed two world wars, the rise and fall of empires, an age of revolutions.

“A composer knows,” Eisler wrote on the eve of his expulsion from the United States, “that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.”