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Knowledge of instrumentation should be acquired through experience. Instrumental composition should be conceived instrumentally, imagining and hearing a particular orchestra for each particular and diverse musical condition of the mind.

— Francesco Balilla Pratella Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music (1911)

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More quotes by Francesco Balilla Pratella

Free one’s own musical sensibility from all influence or imitation of the past...

Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910)

Convince young composers to desert musical lyceums, conservatories, and academies, and to consider free study as the only means of regeneration.

Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910)

I address myself to the young. They alone will have to listen to me, they alone will be able to understand me. Some people are born already old, drooling specters from the past, cryptograms tumid with poisons: to them, no words or ideas except a single injunction: the end.

Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910)

Keep away from commercial and academic environments, disdaining them, and instead preferring a modest life over the large profits which mean that art has to sell out.

Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910)

All innovators, logically speaking, have been Futurists in relation to their time. Palestrina would have thought that Bach was crazy, and Bach would have thought Beethoven the same, and Beethoven would have thought Wagner equally so.

Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music (1911)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Francesco Balilla Pratella (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.