9 quotes
Understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
Critical evaluation was transformed into understanding, and criticism became not an act of judgment but of comprehension.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
More positively, taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension, the proof that we understand it, and we may extend that to sympathy with other listeners' enjoyment ...
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seem to be beside the point—even when the attribution is authoritative, even when it is made by the composer himself.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
Nevertheless, music will not acknowledge a context greater than itself—social, cultural, or biographical—to which it is conveniently subservient. To paraphrase Goethe's grandiose warning to the scientist: do not look behind the notes, they themselves are the doctrine.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
It is not, however, the unfamiliarity or strangeness of a work or of a composer's manner that is a bar to understanding, but rather the disappearance of the familiar, the ongoing disappointment of the expectations and hopes fostered by the musical tradition in which we have grown up.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
If getting used to music is the essential condition for understanding, it is hard to see just what purpose is served by writing about it. A few experiences of listening to a symphony or nocturne are worth more than any essay or analysis. The work of art itself teaches us how to understand it, and makes the critic not merely parasitical but strictly superfluous.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
I have never believed that the historian should seek to perpetuate the misapprehensions of the past, and it is true that we understand Beethoven today better than his contemporaries did, better, above all, than the generation that immediately followed him, including his own most important pupil, Karl Czerny.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)