Harold Powers

"In applications of the music-as-language metaphor we should attend to diverse musical traditions in musical terms, including not only traditions of the music we study but also traditions of how we stu…"

"Counterpoint texts tend to resemble one another in the underlying principles of voice-leading they espouse and in the kinds of orderings of rules they provide, but no one could accuse the harmony text…"

"'Objective' analysis is a tool, primarily useful for suggesting or confirming putative relationships between different musical styles....'Critical' analysis results not in a statistical measurement of…"

"No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But...the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between pre…"

"Rules of simultaneous ensemble constraint can't be assumed a priori to be the kinds of rules or rest on the same foundations as rules for constraint on succession. They may well be similar, but they m…"

"A tonal type is minimally identifiable by its three markers and thus objectively observable completely apart from its musical or cultural context; it is 'scientific,' it is 'etic.' 'Mode' conversely i…"

"Given my present belief in the much greater range of variability as to both order and kind of complexity in the world's musics versus the world's languages, I can hardly imagine how a model developed …"

"neglects to take sufficiently into account the possibilities of critical musical analysis as though from within the culture, be it by a native or a native-trained foreigner."