Quotes by Musicologists

Truth has beauty power and necessity.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
To think of losing is to lose already.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
Jules Combarieu
The Sonata is an essentially dramatic art form combining the emotional range in vivid presentation of a full-size stage drama with the terseness of a short story.
Donald Francis Tovey
Truth has beauty power and necessity.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
To think of losing is to lose already.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
Jules Combarieu
The Sonata is an essentially dramatic art form combining the emotional range in vivid presentation of a full-size stage drama with the terseness of a short story.
Donald Francis Tovey
A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.
Theodor W. Adorno
In a supersonic jet, you'll land before you take off. Your watch - if it's working right - will go back. (It'll stop if it's not). You've made a journey forwards and backwards at the same time. The trip will make you younger.
Zdeněk Mahler
The two women sat by the fire, tilting their glasses and drinking in small peaceful sips. The lamplight shone upon the tidy room and the polished table, lighting topaz in the dandelion wine, spilling pools of crimson through the flanks of the bottle of plum gin. It shone on the contented drinkers, and threw their large, close-at-hand shadows upon the wall. When Mrs Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she were moulding an universe. Laura's nose and chin were defined as sharply as the peaks peaks on a holly leaf.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
After a few months she left off speculating about the villagers. She admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom, but she was content to remain outside the secret, whatever it was. She had not come to Great Mop to concern herself with the hearts of men. Let her stray up the valleys, and rest in the leafless woods that looked so warm with their core of fallen red leaves, and find out her own secret, if she had one; with autumn it might come back to question her. She wondered. She thought not. She felt that nothing could ever again disturb her peace. Wherever she strayed the hills folded themselves round her like the fingers of a hand.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It’s not malice, or wickedness - well, perhaps it is wickedness, for most women love that - but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make horrid children spout up pins and - what is it? - “blight the genial bed.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
The anxious wait lasted four years, and the alert ears never despaired of hearing, at any moment, the voice of the great conch shell which would bellow through the hills to announce to all that Macandal had completed the cycle of his metamorphoses, and stood poised once more, sinewy and hard, with testicles like rocks, on his own human legs" (36-37).
Alejo Carpentier
It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony.This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They are not flawed protagonists either, but are driven at least as much by their unsavory characteristics as by any moral sense. They aren't flawed figures who try to do the right thing; they don't necessarily learn from their mistakes; and we aren't asked to like them in spite of their obvious faults. Though they usually aren't interested in making good, they do set themselves some kind of mission--Anderson's films are mostly quest movies in an age that no longer believes in quests, and this gives them both an old-fashioned flavor and an air of disillusionment and futility.
Arved Mark Ashby
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Theodor W. Adorno
It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
Theodor W. Adorno
Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
Theodor W. Adorno
Today the order of life allows no room for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labor markets and to heighten to commodity value of the personality.
Theodor W. Adorno
In America everything is fantastical.
Alejo Carpentier
Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.
Theodor W. Adorno
On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.
Theodor W. Adorno
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
Theodor W. Adorno
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
Theodor W. Adorno
Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
Theodor W. Adorno
Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
Theodor W. Adorno
The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which...lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life.
Alain Daniélou
A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed; it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.
Charles Rosen
They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
Theodor W. Adorno
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
Jules Combarieu
When Mandela passed away, the long walk to freedom will be longer and harder. I wish with my tears that every parent tell about Mandela to their children, shall their children grow up firmly and with faith.
Professor Pezhman Mosleh
Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
Theodor Adorno
The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.
Theodor W. Adorno
In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
Theodor W. Adorno
Mankind will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry, or money.
Ernst Levy
...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it.
Theodor Adorno
She was heavier than he expected - women always are.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.
Theodor W. Adorno
In a society of increasingly mass-produced, assembly-line entertainment, where every individual is treated like an empty pitcher to be filled from above, jazz retains something of the spirit of the handicrafts of yesteryear. The print of the human spirit warms it. Deep down, jazz expresses the enforced & compassionate attitudes of a minority group and may well appeal to us because we all have blue moods and, in a fundamental sense, none of us is wholly free.
Marshall W. Stearns
Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?
Theodor W. Adorno
Music is a mixed mathematical science that concerns the origens, attributes, and distinctions of sound, out of which a cultivated and lovely melody and harmony are made, so that God is honored and praised but mankind is moved to devotion, virtue, joy, and sorrow.
Christoph Wolff
Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself.
Theodor W. Adorno
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor W. Adorno
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
Theodor W. Adorno
In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.
Theodor W. Adorno
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
Theodor W. Adorno