ALMA ENSEMBLE

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler for a musician to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous environment, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing trying to end them? To surrender: to give up; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That ’Education’ is heir to. Is this a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d? To give up: to surrender; To surrender: and yet to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that kind of sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this creative coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The Professors’ wrong, the Proud Men’s contumely, The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay, The insolence of the Academy and the spurns That patient merit of the Unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a mere Qualification? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life of thorough quests, But that the dread of something in creative processes, The undiscover’d countries from whose bourn (once known) Is so hard to take leave, puzzles the will And makes many rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus routine does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of ’Rules’, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of ART .