19th-century Musicologist Quotes

On the one hand it is said that the aim and object of music is to excite emotions, i.e., pleasurable emotions; on the other hand, the emotions are said to be the subject matter which musical works are intended to illustrate. Both propositions are alike in this, that one is as false as the other.

Eduard Hanslick

On the first performance of Stravinsky's Symphony of Wind Instruments dedicated to Debussy, in London:

I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy so much as this.

Great music has always been rooted in religion — when religion is understood as an attitude toward superhuman power and the mysteries of the universe.

CANADA, colonized, evangelized and peopled by the French in the sixteenth century, and called by them "New France," has retained, both in the customs and the physiognomy of its inhabitants, the characteristics of a French province — at least in the province of Quebec.

Music as a whole, in its overwhelming wealth and endlessness, is inaccessible unless we free ourselves from the limitations of our own restricted training.