„Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seem to be beside the point—even when the attribution is authoritative, even when it is made by the composer himself.“

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— Charles Rosen

Quelle: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 3 : Explaining the Obvious

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Charles Rosen

US-amerikanischer Pianist und Musiktheoretiker 1927 - 2012

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„Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.“

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— Leonard Bernstein American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist 1918 - 1990

The Cambridge Companion to Conducting p. 16.

„Unfortunately, the word "system" has many colloquial meanings, some of which have no place in scientific discussion. In order to exclude such meanings, and at the same time provide a starting point for exposition we state the following definition:
A system is a set of objects together with relationships between the objects and between their attributes.
Our definition does imply of course that a system has properties, functions or purposes distinct from its constituent objects, relationships and attributes.“

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— Arthur D. Hall American electrical engineer 1925 - 2006

Quelle: Definition of System, 1956, p. 18: Italics quote cited in: Thorbjoern Mann (1992) Building Economics for Architects. p. 140

„"You grow with music, or the music outgrows you." - attributed to Lennon, but no verifiable source found“

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— John Lennon English singer and songwriter 1940 - 1980

Disputed

„The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.“

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— Igor Stravinsky Russian composer, pianist and conductor 1882 - 1971

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (1962). Expositions and Developments.
1960s

„When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.“

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— Bertolt Brecht German poet, playwright, theatre director 1898 - 1956

Quelle: Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic

„The very being of music is created by cognitive attributions made by individual perceiving or conceiving imaginers, in individual acts of perceiving or conceiving--that, in fact, the only real music 'theory' IS the creative-intellectual transaction which ontologizes music itself.“

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— Benjamin Boretz American composer 1934

from Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.

„For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.“

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— Igor Stravinsky Russian composer, pianist and conductor 1882 - 1971

Igor Stravinsky (1936). An Autobiography, p. 53-54.
1930s

„And 'speak truth unto power'? What does this mean? It means giving your best advice to superiors based on the best information available and objective analysis even when you know it may not be music to their ears.“

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— Anson Chan Hong Kong politician 1940

Quelle: From Anson Chan's speech addressing to the Asia Society Hong Kong Center in April 2001.

„A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments.“

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— Hans Hofmann American artist 1880 - 1966

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40-46
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

„Why did Mozart compose music?“

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— Jonas Salk Inventor of polio vaccine 1914 - 1995

Response when asked why he chose to do medical research rather than be a practicing physician, as quoted in The Polio Man : The Story of Dr. Jonas Salk (1961) by John Rowland, p. 23

„…WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.
THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE INADEQUATE FOR THE COMPOSER, WHO WILL BE FACED WITH THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND.“

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— John Cage American avant-garde composer 1912 - 1992

Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); SILENCE; lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, CREDO/3
1930s

„A. No matter what you do, you're always hearing something.
Q. You mean to say that all of the accidental environmental sounds that surround the piece become a part of the realization of the score?
A. Yes, that's right.
Q. In that case, even the chairs are musical?
A. Yes. In fact, there is perhaps nothing that is not musical. Perhaps there's no moment in life that's not musical.“

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— George Brecht American artist and composer 1926 - 2008

Quelle: James Fitzsimmons, ‎Jim Fitzsimmons (1967). Art International. Vol. 11. p. 24

„The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means.“

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— Richard Wagner, buch Opera and Drama

Opera and Drama (1851)

„The time is past when music was written for a handful of aesthetes. Today vast crowds of people have come face to face with serious music and are waiting with eager impatience. Composers, take heed of this…But this does not mean that you must pander to this audience. Pandering always has an element of insincerity about it and nothing good ever came of that.“

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— Sergei Prokofiev Ukrainian & Russian Soviet pianist and composer 1891 - 1953

Page 106; from a notebook entry (1937).
Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences (1960)

„When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks.“

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— Max Horkheimer German philosopher and sociologist 1895 - 1973

Quelle: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 28.
Kontext: When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.

„Even if the world ends, the Music will still survive…. Music has no caste.“

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— Bismillah Khan Indian musician 1916 - 2006

Quoted in [Ekbal, Nikhat, Great Muslims of undivided India, http://books.google.com/books?id=JsDNDeHkb8AC&pg=PA45, 2009, Gyan Publishing House, 978-81-7835-756-0, 45–]
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