Music

"The performance of tayil is restricted to women termed eltun. The verb denotes the act of pulling as associated with extracting teeth, the drawing of water from a well, and the uprooting of a plant. The Mapuche explain eltun as 'pulling or extracting by force,' or 'removing something from its source.' The performance of tayil 'pulls' the compound patrilineal soul out of an individual through a specific combination of melodic contour and iconographic text."

"Music is the space between the notes. It is something to be felt. Although it does not has a concrete and precise definition....All of us know that music is every sound that reaches our ears and our heart says that it is something fabulous.....that is music."

"The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man [sic] and time."

"Form is supposed to cover the shape or structure of the work; content its substance, meaning, ideas, or expressive effects. When the nineteenth-century music critic Eduard Hanslick declared, in an influential phrase, that music is 'forms put into motion through sounds,' he was suggesting that music's real content lies in its form."

""'Is music the art of combining sounds according to certain rules (which vary according to place and time) for organizing a durational unit [une durée] by means of sonorous elements?' (Petit-Robert). Here, music is defined according to the conditions of its production (it is an art) and by its materials: sounds. For another writer, 'the study of sound is a matter of physics. But choosing sounds that are pleasing to the ear is a matter of musical aesthetics' (Bourgeois 1946: 1). Definition according to conditions of production has ceded to definition according to effect produced in the "receiver": sounds, to be music, must be pleasant. For others, music is almost always identified with acoustics, a particular branch of physics: 'certainly the study of acoustics and the properties of sound in some sense goes beyond the domain of the properly musical, but these 'divergences' are much less important and numerous than is generally thought' (Matras 1948: 5)."

"Music is a play of tones, that is, of fixed, clearly defined quantities. Other sounds, glissandos, cries, noises, may occur as inserts; if they are numerous the result is partly musical; if they predominate, it is no longer music in the proper sense of the word...discussion about the nature of the new art of sounds, those part musical and those totally untonal, is beclouded by the fact that it is called concrete or electronic 'music' although it has in fact transgressed the boundaries of musical art."

"We are too rarely interested in specifying what defines the concept 'music' in the spirit of indigenous peoples. We would be hard put to say (for whatever population or group we might choose) where music begins for them, where it ends, what borders mark the transition between speaking and singing."

"Music is motion in time."

"Understanding, and eventually defining tayil [a "musical" genre] demands a delineation of its relationships to other phenomena in the Mapuche world. As a basis for departure we may say that tayil is the lifeforce that an individual shares with all living or deceased members of his/her patrilineage. The shared soul of a patrilineage is termed kimpen; the essence of a kimpen can be verbalized or activated only through the performance of its respective tayil."

"Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which doesn't know that it is counting."

"Music is organized sound."

"[Tonality is] prolonged motion within the framework of a single key-determined progression."

"[Tonality is] directed motion within the framework of a single prolonged sonority."

"The inception of the principle of tonality and certain of its techniques expressing themselves in the construction of tonal units of various length and complexity goes as far back as the Organa of St. Martial and Santiago de Compostela. A continuous development of structural polyphony from the twelfth to the twentieth century may with justification be assumed. Whether we encounter the use of modes or the major-minor system, whether the contrapuntal voice voice leadings are different from those of later periods or whether harmonic thinking expresses itself in a different manner than later on in the eighteenth century, the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance demonstrates the same basic principles of direction, continuity and coherence as music from the Baroque period to the twentieth century."

"Music is tonal when its motion unfolds through time a particular tone, interval, or chord."

"The medieval musician … did not hear a triad as a triad … a textbook definition of tonal coherence is not the same as the phenomenon of tonal cognition as experiences."

"In the passage quoted here from Monteverdi's madrigal [Cruda amarilli, mm.9-19 and 24-30], one sees a tonality determined by the accord parfait [root position major chord] on the tonic, by the sixth chord assigned to the third and seventh degrees, by the optional choice of the accord parfait or the sixth chord on the sixth degree, and finally, by the accord parfait and, above all, by the unprepared seventh chord (with major third) on the dominant. (p.171)"

"[Tonality is the] set of relationships, simultaneous or successive, among the tones of the scale."

"[Tonality is] the special meaning [functions] that chords receive through their relationship to a fundamental sonority, the tonic triad."

"[Tonality is] the art of combining tones in such successions and such harmonies or successions of harmonies, that the relation of all events to a fundamental tone is made possible."

"Tonality is the organized relationship of musical sounds, as perceived and interpreted with respect to some central point of reference that seems to co-ordinate the separate items and events and to lend them meaning as component parts of a unified whole."

"[Tonality is] contrapuntal progressions … can be key defining and capable of assuming structural significance."

"But one will say, 'What is the principal behind these scales, and what, if not acoustic phenomena and the laws of mathematics, has set the order of their tones?' I respond that this principle is purely metaphysical [anthropological]. We conceive this order and the melodic and harmonic phenomena that spring from it out of our conformation and education. (p.249)"

"For the elements of music, nature provides nothing but a multitude of tones differing in pitch, duration, and intensity by the greater or least degree... The conception of the relationships that exist among them is awakened in the intellect, and, by the action of sensitivity on the one hand, and will on the other, the mind coordinates the tones into different series, each of which corresponds to a particular class of emotions, sentiments, and ideas. Hence these series become various types of tonalities. (p.11f)"

"I find above all that the expression, 'atonal music,' is most unfortunate--it is on a par with calling flying 'the art of not falling,' or swimming 'the art of not drowning.'"

"A composer's awareness of the plurality of functions of his own tools forms the basis for his responsibility just as, in everyday life, every man's responsibility begins with the recognition of the multiplicity of human races, conditions, needs, and ideals. I would go as far as to say (as my anger comes back) that any attempt to codify musical reality into a kind of imitation grammar (I refer mainly to the efforts associated with the Twelve-Tone System) is a brand of fetishism which shares with Fascism and racism the tendency to reduce live processes to immobile, labeled objects, the tendency to deal with formalities rather than substance. Claude Lévi-Strauss describes (though to illustrate a different point) a captain at sea, his ship reduced to a frail raft without sails, who, by enforcing a meticulous protocol on his crew, is able to distract them from nostalgia for a safe harbor and from the desire for a destination."

"What results [from the compositional system of Boulez's Structures] can only be described as composition by numerology. The possiblities are endless; a computer could be programmed to put down notes according to this prescription and in a very short time could turn out enough music to require years for its performance. By using different numerical rules -- using a knight's move, for example, rather than a bishop's move along the diagonals — music for centuries to come could be produced."

"Alas, this industrialized twelve-tone horse, dull on the outside and empty inside, constantly being perfected and dragged to a new Troy in shadow of an ideological war long since fought and won by responsible minds like Schoenberg, with neither systems nor scholarship for armor!"

"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."

"As a music theorist, I have always contended that the historical approach to music theory is not enough. The modern theorist should, of course, be able to analyze the music of the masters, to explain (as much as possible) the sources of their musical language. They should also, however, be able to suggest new paths, new theories, including those that break with creative and scholarly tradition....This attitude has puzzled some of my academic colleagues, since I am in my own composition essentially a traditionalist. I do not believe that this is a contradiction or an inconsistency."

"It is important to remember that there really is very little resembling criticism of any sort in musicology."

"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."

"For me … the notion of an intimate relationship between music and society functions not as a distant goal but as a starting point of great immediacy, and not as an hypothesis but as an assumption. It functions as an idea about a relationship which in turn allows the examination of that relationship from many points of view and its exploration in many directions. It is an idea that generates studies the goal of which (or at least one important goal of which) is to articulate something essential about why any particular music is the way it is in particular, that is, to achieve insight into the character of its identity."

"Tonality itself—with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax—is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire.""

"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.""

"Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential." from http://web.archive.org/20030225083736/www.ucla.edu/spotlight/archive/html_2001_2002/fac0502_mcclalry.html"

"Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities—even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence."

"Burn down the disco Hang the blessed DJ Because the music that they constantly play It says nothing to me about my life Hang the blessed DJ Because the music they constantly play On the Leeds side-streets that you slip down Provincial towns you jog 'round Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ"

"It was a DJ style which helped to create the lifestyle which came to be known as hip hop. At the beginning of the disco era in the first half of the 1970s, regular disco jocks in clubs were most concerned with the blend between one record and the next - matching tempos to make a smooth transition which, at its best, could continually alter the mood on the dancefloor without breaking the flow. At its worst the technique could turn the night into one endless and inevitably boring song."

"I'm getting a dj" where dj is a broad service focused "chotchkie" or junket"

"Last night a DJ saved my life, yeah 'Cause I was sittin' there bored to death And in just one breath he said You gotta get up You gotta get on You gotta get down girl ... Last night a DJ saved my life Last night a DJ saved my life from a broken heart Last night a DJ saved my life Last night a DJ saved my life with a song"

"Now he took the music of like Mandrill, like "Fencewalk", certain disco records that had funky percussion breaks like The Incredible Bongo Band when they came out with "Apache" and he just kept that beat going. It might be that certain part of the record that everybody waits for--they just let their inner self go and get wild. The next thing you know the singer comes back in and you'd be mad."

"Break-beat music and hip-hop culture were happening at the same time as the emergence of disco (in 1974 known as party music). Disco was also created by DJs in its initial phase, though these tended to be club jocks rather than mobile party jocks - records by Barry White, Eddie Kendricks and others became dancefloor hits in New York clubs like Tamberlane and Sanctuary and were crossed over onto radio by Frankie Crocker at station WBLS. There were many parallels in the techniques used by Kool DJ Herc and a pioneering disco DJ like Francis Grasso, who worked at Sanctuary, as they used similar mixtures and superimpositions of drumbeats, rock music, funk and African records For less creative disco DJs, however, the ideal was to slip-cute smoothly from the end of one record into the beginning of the next. They also created a context for breaks rather than foregrounding them, and the disco records which emerged out of the influence of this type of mixing tended to feature long introductions, anthemic choruses and extended vamp sections, all creating a tension which was released by the break. Break-beat music simply ate the cherry off the top of the cake and threw the rest away. In the words of DJ Grandmaster Flash:"

":'Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records. The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on.'""

"These kind of narrative poems are called toasts. They are rhyming stories, often lengthy, which are told mostly amongst men. Violent, scatalogical, obscene, misogynist, they have been used for decades to while away the time in situations of enforced boredom, whether prison, armed services or streetcorner life."

"Form is a theatrical event of a certain length, and the length itself may be unpredictable."

"'Form' has always come into being in a dialogue between particular 'instances' and the larger body of work, or 'tradition.'"

"Form is supposed to cover the shape or structure of the work; content its substance, meaning, ideas, or expressive effects. When the nineteenth-century music critic Eduard Hanslick declared, in an influential phrase, that music is 'forms put into motion through sounds,' he was suggesting that music's real content lies in its form."

"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."

"There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is a consequence of this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals.""