Sources and Quotations Flashcards
‘Music is powerless to express anything’
Stravinsky’s autobiography (1936)
‘Who cares if you listen?’
Milton Babbitt (1958)
Serialism ‘grew out of necessity’ with the ‘emancipation of dissonance’
Schoenberg ‘composition with 12 tones’ (1941)
‘Our push forward had to be made’; intuitively discovered’ and ‘an inevitable development’
Webern ‘the path of 12 note composition’ (1963)
‘The security provided by the form turns out to be a medium for shock absorption’
Adorno
‘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’
Debussy ‘Why I wrote Pelleas’ (1902)
‘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’
Debussy (1908, 1915)
Our knowledge of colonialised peoples ‘tinged and impressed with , violated by, [that] gross political fact’
Edward Said, Orientalism (1979)
‘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’
Henry Cowell, Neo-primitivism (1933)
I give the listener a sense of the closeness of the people to the earth, of the commonality of their lives with the earth’
Stravinsky on The Rite of Spring (1913)
‘Middlebrow’
Virginia Wolfe (1932)
‘Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same’
Greenberg (1953)
Sound in film ‘render[s] the individual an untroublesome viewing subject: less critical, less “awake”
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies
Performance is ‘a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world’
Shank, ‘The Political Agency of Musical Beauty’ (2011)
‘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’
Henry Cowell ‘New Musical Resources’ (1930)
‘One has to follow the basic set; but, nevertheless, one composes as freely as before.’
Schoenberg ‘Composition with 12 tones’ (1941)
‘The preclassic or classic […] have no historic link to the dodecaphonic discovery’ – ‘The two worlds are incompatible’
Boulez Schoenberg is dead (1952)
Arguments Against modern art
Outlined in Boulez, ‘Aesthetics and the Fetishists’ (1961-62)
‘Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments’
John Cage, from ‘Experimental Music’ (1957)
‘Whatever my message, it will reach the listener unadulterated by “interpretation” ‘
Varese ‘The Liberation of Sound’ (1917)
Principles of musique concrète
Pierre Schaeffer ‘La musique concrète’ (1967)
‘mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’; ‘designed for reproducibility’
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1939)
‘Studios are unique; they have a sound, a vibe, and even […] a transformative effect’
Eliot Bates on ‘What Studios Do’ (2013)
I do not say “Oh, what interesting sounds!” I say, “What happened?”
Lauchmann’s ‘Musique concrète instrumentale’ in (2003)
‘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.’
John Cage ‘Experimental Music’ (1957)
Minimalism as ‘pieces of music that are, literally, processes.’
Reich, ‘Music and Gradual Process’ (1968)
(On minimalism): ‘Process music comes to the table already digested’
Ian Quinn
‘this music situates us in a deep present, a now that is centuries old and an ancientness that is still alive.’
Paul Griffiths, on Avo Part’s ‘Tabula rasa’
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’
Britten’s Aspen Award acceptance speech (1964)
‘Music is an art that has no “meaning” ‘
Boulez, Aesthetics and the Fetishists’ (1961-62)
‘We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.’
Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises’ (1913)
‘The lone man should find his symphony within himself, […] in being his own instrument’
Schaeffer (1952)
‘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.’
Stockhausen (1971)
(of 1960s minimalist art) ‘the thing . . . is not supposed to be suggestive of anything other than itself’
Barbara Rose
Death of the Author
Roland Barthes (1968)
‘Harmony is expression and nothing else. … Away with Pathos!’
Schoenberg in a letter to Busoni
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
Murray Schaefer on ‘The Soundscape’
‘Music hides the traces of its appropriations, hybridities and representations, so that they come over time to be naturalised and aestheticized’
Born and Hesmondhaugh, 2000
‘Music is the hidden exercise of arithmetic in which the spirit does not know that it is counting’
Leibniz, 1712
‘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’
Haas
