Musicologist Quotes

Isidore of Seville
Pierre Schaeffer
Eduard Hanslick

The rhetorical process functioned in many areas other than speech: Curtius wrote about 'rhetorical landscape representations' while Serpieris speaks of 'la retorica al teatro' (the rhetorical use of theatrical space), and music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric.

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
Eduard Hanslick
The name of medicine is thought to have been given from 'moderation', modus, that is, from a due proportion, which advises that things be done not to excess, but 'little by little', paulatim. For nature is pained by surfeit but rejoices in moderation. Whence also those who take drugs and antidotes constantly, or to the point of saturation, are sorely vexed, for every immoderation brings not health but danger.

Isidore of Seville
Isidore of Seville
These differences can make it difficult for female musicians to enter male-dominated musical cultures.

Considering how readily musicologists criticize one another – witness the merciless footnotes (and reviews) of so many books and articles – the innocent bystander must find it strange that they remain unwilling to venture judgments about the quality of the music around which they work…But it is hard to see what can be the purpose of musicology if not to advise people on what to hear and how to hear it. Separating out the good, the bad and the indifferent, and helping listeners enjoy the best, is surely the least we can offer society in return for our keep.

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music.... The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is... devastating.

The term "chorus form" is often used to denote a type of performance - typically in jazz or rhythm 'n' blues, but also sometimes in country music and rock 'n' roll - where a given structural unit is repeated an indefinite number of times. The unit itself may be sectionally elaborate, as in the case of most Tin Pan Alley ballads. It may be twelve-bar blues, or something similar, as in the case of many R&B and rock 'n' roll numbers: here, a three-line AAB lyric, set to a three-phrase melody, is underpinned by a single gestural sweep in the harmony. Occasionally - as in some funk, dub reggae, and hip-hop, for example - it may approach the status of open-ended process.

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer
This shared concern with continuity accounts for a good part of the affinity I feel with Schoenberg, an affinity I have openly claimed in drawing from him both the title and the subtitle of the present volume. To me, as to Schoenberg, such continuity constitutes important evidence that the essentially aesthetic act of constructing a 'text,' whether on paper or in one's professional life, has been subjected to rational restraints, in all the Kantian senses of 'rationality.' From this viewpoint, continuity is valued as a sign that a text has been carefully constructed to meet rigorous standards not only of formal coherence but also of logical precision and, espeically crucial, of moral scrupulousness.

Language is the garment of thought, just as melody is the garment of harmony.

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.

Consumerism is an antipollution drive in relation to the toxic areas of advertising.

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

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.