Music Theorist

Quotes & Thinkers in Music Theorist

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"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."

"Don’t hold yourselves cheap, seeing that the creator of all things and of you estimates your value so high, so dear, that he pours out for you every day the most precious blood of his only-begotten Son."

"Jakob Bernoulli, John Wallis, The Doctrine of Permutations and Combinations"

"Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."

"Sonata form could not be defined until it was dead. Czerny claimed with pride around 1840 that he was the first to describe it, but then it was already part of history."

67 quotes

🇫🇷Pierre Schaeffer

Literature

musique concrète instrumentale

1910–1995

"Sound is the vocabulary of nature... noises are as well articulated as the words in a dictionary... Opposing the world of sound is the world of music."

"The Pianoforte Sonatas of Beethoven must always be among the choicest possessions of all who love music and especially of those who make music their main object and study."

"Here we may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her Cost and Finery upon this small Speck of Dirt."

15 quotes

Marcus Terentius Varro

"In antiquity, life was nothing but silence. Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility."

"Harmonices mundi in fulltext facsimile at Carnegie-Mellon University"

"Compared with this art, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire is lukewarm lemonade."

🇩🇪Hermann von Helmholtz

Science

1821–1894

"On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music Fourth Edition, By Hermann von Helmholtz, Alexander John Ellis, Published by Longmans, Green, 1912, 575 pages"

"Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it."

"The greatest work of the composer is often sublimation, that is, the deflection of energies, thoughts, occurrences, psychological and physical reactions, into socially constructive or creative channels."

"In f-major, c* is a sonority contained within the overtones of the tonic f* ."

2 quotes

🇩🇪Karlheinz Stockhausen

Music

20th-century classical music

1928–2007

"Sir Thomas Beecham was asked if he had ever conducted any Stockhausen. He said, "No, but I once trod in some."

"Music was destined to reach its culmination in the likeness of itself."

"And grant that a man read all the books of music that ever were wrote, I shall not allow that music is or can be understood out of them, no more than the taste of meats out of cookish receipt books."

20th-century classical music

1925–2016

"ny musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch."

"Geomancy was a natural art, drawing on the inborn powers of the human soul to glean information from the larger soul of the world."

"Madam, I have come from a country where people are hanged if they talk."

"the comparatively large share of drums, however, indicates the neighborhood of India"

"There are no more geniuses, only critics."

"The Lasting Appeal of Orff's Carmina Burana"

9 quotes

Porphyry (philosopher)

Philosophy

233–301

"The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts a training in humanity and pity."

20 quotes

Ptolemy

Science

"Ptolemy's Geography is the only book on cartography to have survived from the classical period and one of the most influential scientific works of all time."

"Rhythmical music is that which is made by instruments which render the sound by touch."

2 quotes

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