Daniel Levitin - Art Quotes

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When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity...

Daniel Levitin
Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots.... Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard.... harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation.

Daniel Levitin
The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

Daniel Levitin
The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others.

Daniel Levitin
Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality.... that is a feature of the musical brain.

Daniel Levitin
Human process music using both absolute and relational processing... we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species... These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, and art.

Daniel Levitin
The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.

Daniel Levitin
The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

Daniel Levitin
Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.

Daniel Levitin
What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas.

Daniel Levitin