Sources and Quotations

Question 1

‘Music is powerless to express anything’

Answer 1

Stravinsky’s autobiography (1936)

Question 2

‘Who cares if you listen?’

Answer 2

Milton Babbitt (1958)

Question 3

Serialism ‘grew out of necessity’ with the ‘emancipation of dissonance’

Answer 3

Schoenberg ‘composition with 12 tones’ (1941)

Question 4

‘Our push forward had to be made’; intuitively discovered’ and ‘an inevitable development’

Answer 4

Webern ‘the path of 12 note composition’ (1963)

Question 5

‘The security provided by the form turns out to be a medium for shock absorption’

Answer 5

Adorno

Question 6

‘I have tried to forge a way ahead that other will follow’; ‘to release dramatic music from the heavy yoke under which it has lived long’

Answer 6

Debussy ‘Why I wrote Pelleas’ (1902)

Question 7

‘The foreign mind has imposed itself upon what could have been a glorious tradition’; ‘give our artists a sense of purity and remind them of the nobility of French blood’

Answer 7

Debussy (1908, 1915)

Question 8

Our knowledge of colonialised peoples ‘tinged and impressed with , violated by, [that] gross political fact’

Answer 8

Edward Said, Orientalism (1979)

Question 9

‘Many of the customary generalisations can no longer be made in the face of this wider knowledge. […] Nor can primitive music be lumped into one group’

Answer 9

Henry Cowell, Neo-primitivism (1933)

Question 10

I give the listener a sense of the closeness of the people to the earth, of the commonality of their lives with the earth’

Answer 10

Stravinsky on The Rite of Spring (1913)

Question 11

‘Middlebrow’

Answer 11

Virginia Wolfe (1932)

Question 12

‘Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same’

Answer 12

Greenberg (1953)

Question 13

Sound in film ‘render[s] the individual an untroublesome viewing subject: less critical, less “awake”

Answer 13

Gorbman, Unheard Melodies

Question 14

Performance is ‘a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world’

Answer 14

Shank, ‘The Political Agency of Musical Beauty’ (2011)

Question 15

‘It is not the aim of this work to delve into questions of [aesthetics/philosophy/’correctness’]’ but instead ‘add to the possibilities of musical expression’

Answer 15

Henry Cowell ‘New Musical Resources’ (1930)

Question 16

‘One has to follow the basic set; but, nevertheless, one composes as freely as before.’

Answer 16

Schoenberg ‘Composition with 12 tones’ (1941)

Question 17

‘The preclassic or classic […] have no historic link to the dodecaphonic discovery’ – ‘The two worlds are incompatible’

Answer 17

Boulez Schoenberg is dead (1952)

Question 18

Arguments Against modern art

Answer 18

Outlined in Boulez, ‘Aesthetics and the Fetishists’ (1961-62)

Question 19

‘Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments’

Answer 19

John Cage, from ‘Experimental Music’ (1957)

Question 20

‘Whatever my message, it will reach the listener unadulterated by “interpretation” ‘

Answer 20

Varese ‘The Liberation of Sound’ (1917)

Question 21

Principles of musique concrète

Answer 21

Pierre Schaeffer ‘La musique concrète’ (1967)

Question 22

‘mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’; ‘designed for reproducibility’

Answer 22

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1939)

Question 23

‘Studios are unique; they have a sound, a vibe, and even […] a transformative effect’

Answer 23

Eliot Bates on ‘What Studios Do’ (2013)

Question 24

I do not say “Oh, what interesting sounds!” I say, “What happened?”

Answer 24

Lauchmann’s ‘Musique concrète instrumentale’ in (2003)

Question 25

‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.’

Answer 25

John Cage ‘Experimental Music’ (1957)

Question 26

Minimalism as ‘pieces of music that are, literally, processes.’

Answer 26

Reich, ‘Music and Gradual Process’ (1968)

Question 27

(On minimalism): ‘Process music comes to the table already digested’

Answer 27

Ian Quinn

Question 28

‘this music situates us in a deep present, a now that is centuries old and an ancientness that is still alive.’

Answer 28

Paul Griffiths, on Avo Part’s ‘Tabula rasa’

Question 29

I certainly write music for human beings – directly and deliberately’; ‘Music does not exist in a vacuum, it does not exist until it is performed’

Answer 29

Britten’s Aspen Award acceptance speech (1964)

Question 30

‘Music is an art that has no “meaning” ‘

Answer 30

Boulez, Aesthetics and the Fetishists’ (1961-62)

Question 31

‘We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.’

Answer 31

Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises’ (1913)

Question 32

‘The lone man should find his symphony within himself, […] in being his own instrument’

Answer 32

Schaeffer (1952)

Question 33

‘I am a myth, I am a name […] Like ‘Beethoven’: who was he? He was a very miserable person, I must say, as a human being. And he is a myth for something that we are, that is within ourselves.’

Answer 33

Stockhausen (1971)

Question 34

(of 1960s minimalist art) ‘the thing . . . is not supposed to be suggestive of anything other than itself’

Answer 34

Barbara Rose

Question 35

Death of the Author

Answer 35

Roland Barthes (1968)

Question 36

‘Harmony is expression and nothing else. … Away with Pathos!’

Answer 36

Schoenberg in a letter to Busoni

Question 37

Musical output of a society is a reflection of the social indicators that produce it and its wellbeing; the ubiquity of KEY NOTE sounds have deep effect on our mood

Answer 37

Murray Schaefer on ‘The Soundscape’

Question 38

‘Music hides the traces of its appropriations, hybridities and representations, so that they come over time to be naturalised and aestheticized’

Answer 38

Born and Hesmondhaugh, 2000

Question 39

‘Music is the hidden exercise of arithmetic in which the spirit does not know that it is counting’

Answer 39

Leibniz, 1712

Question 40

‘I am constantly asking myself, what right do I have to withdraw into my quiet little house and compose while all around me things are happening’

Answer 40

Haas