"Concerts are moments of communal realisation. It takes genius - or the
demagogue - to tell an audience what it is going to know. It takes a more
transparent and watery form of genius to enable an audience to discover what it
needs to know." Edwin Prévost (1995), No sound is innocent - Meta-musical
narratives (Essex: Copula)
"You find yourself located in what has come to be known, geographically and
culturally, as a remote corner of the world. No one in your own surrounding
seems to hear or understand, but you realise that crossing local borders is the
least of your tasks (...)"
Tony Herrington (1996) | Publisher and Chief editor, The Wire (issue 150,
August 1996)
"Many people have given up saying 'experimental' about this new music. Instead,
they either move to a halfway point and say 'controversial' or depart to a
greater distance and question whether this 'music' is music at all". John Cage
(1939) Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press)
"no musical style has 'its own terms': its terms are the terms of its society
and culture, and of the bodies of the human beings who listen to it, and create
and perform it." Blacking, John (1973), How musical is man? (Seattle,
London: University of Washington press)
"La varietà dei rumori è infinita. Col molteplicarsi di nuove macchine, potremo
distinguere dieci, venti o trentamila rumori diversi, non da imitare
semplicemente, ma da combinare secondo la nostra fantasia". Russolo, Luigi
(1916), L’Arte dei Rumori (Milano: Edizione futuriste di 'Poesie')
"Creative musical originality implies a break with musical tradition through the
introduction of original, novel, and non-existent musical contributions. [...] What is original for one social and artistic-cultural environment is not
necessarily so for another". Ivo Supicic: 329).
"La musique a été, et est encore, un lieu formidablement privilégié d’analyse et
de révélation des formes nouvelles de notre société. Elle a annoncé, avant le
reste du processus social, la destruction du sacrifice dans l’échange et la
représentation, puis le stockage du simulacre de l’usage dans la répétion".
Attali, Jacques, Bruits- essai sur l’économie politique de la musique’
(Paris: PUF, 1977),
Music: "that one of the fine Arts which is concerned with the combination
of sounds with a view to beauty of form and expression of emotion."
Oxford Dictionary
"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is
why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is
no reason". John Cage (1978), Silence - lectures and writings by John Cage
(London: Boyars)
September 2008
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