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If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover,Have throbb'd at our lay, 'tis thy glory alone;I was but as the wind, passing heedlessly over,And all the wild sweetness I wak'd was thy own.
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If thou would'st have me sing and play As once I play'd and sung,First take this time-worn lute away, And bring one freshly strung.
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If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits."
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If you want to play a trick on me, put your flutes more in accord.
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Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments (1959), pp. 113-114
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Improvise like a composer; compose like an improviser.
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In a sadly pleasing strainLet the warbling lute complain.
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In hollow murmurs died away.
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In notes by distance made more sweet.
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In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.
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In this day and time you can't even get sick; you are strung-out! Well by God, I'll tell you something, friend: I have never been strung-out in my life, except on music!
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Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Book II. 19.
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Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae Bk. 3, ch. 17, sect. 1; p. 137. Translations and page-numbers are taken from Ernest Brehaut An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville (New York: B. Franklin, [1912] 1964). Bk. 3, ch. 17, sect. 1; p. 137.
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It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed. … To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition... Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves—not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.
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It is the little rift within the luteThat by and by will make the music mute,And ever widening slowly silence all.