Musicologist

Arthur Schopenhauer

Philosophy

Idealism

1788–1860

"Life is a business that does not cover the costs."

🇫🇷René Descartes

Philosophy

rationalism

1596–1650

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

Max Weber

Science

1836–1897

"Politics means a strong slow drilling of hard boards, with passion and judgment at the same time."

🇺🇸Theodor Adorno

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1903–1969

"Traditional philosophy’s claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics."

🇨🇦Robertson Davies

Literature

1913–1995

"To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason."

🇺🇸John Cage

Art

Fluxus

1912–1992

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

John Wallis

Mathematics

1616–1703

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

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."

🇬🇧Donald Tovey

Music

1875–1940

"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."

🇫🇷Albert Schweitzer

Philosophy

1921–2023

"Profound love demands a deep conception and out of this develops reverence for the mystery of life. It brings us close to all beings, to the poorest and smallest as well as all others."

🇺🇸Charles Rosen

Music

1927–2012

"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."

Eduard Hanslick

Philosophy

1825–1904

"a language which we speak and understand but cannot translate"

Johannes Tinctoris

Literature

Renaissance music

1435–1511

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

🇭🇺Géza Révész

Military

1878–1955

"Ebbinghaus: Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time."

🇺🇸Pete Seeger

Music

1919–2014

"A productive mistake is: made in the service of mission and vision; acknowledged as a mistake; learned from; considered valuable; shared for the benefit of all."

"Lazy geniuses! There are no such men. Laziness and genius never go hand in hand. Each excludes the other. Laziness is the best proof of the absence of genius."

"Because of the variables and the complexity of their interaction, the data assembled by descriptive musicology yield relatively few observable regularities."

🇫🇷François-Bernard Mâche

Music

classical music

b. 1935

"Myth does not set out to give lessons in natural science any more than in morals or sociology."

Nicole Oresme

Philosophy

1320–1382

"Since money belongs to the community … it would seem that the community may control it as it wills, and therefore may make as much profit from alteration as it likes, and treat money as its own property."

Robert Burns

Music

Romanticism

1759–1796

"That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane."

🇳🇱Christiaan Huygens

Science

1629–1695

"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."

🇭🇺Béla Bartók

Music

1881–1945

"In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution."

🇩🇪Johannes Kepler

Science

1571–1630

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

🇺🇸Edward Said

Literature

1935–2003

"As a way of maintaining relative intellectual independence, having the attitude of an amateur instead of a professional is a better course."

"Music is the outward and audible signification of inward and spiritual realities."

🇩🇪Johann Sebastian Bach

Music

Baroque music

1685–1750

"I have this to say about Bach's works: Listen, play, love, revere — and keep your trap shut."

Ferruccio Busoni

Music

1866–1924

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

Felix Mendelssohn

Music

Romantic music

1809–1847

"A prophet such as we could use again today, strong, zealous, angry and gloomy in opposition to the leaders, the masses, indeed the whole world."

🇩🇪Robert Schumann

Music

1810–1856

"In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of."

🇩🇪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"

🇫🇷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."