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Our music has sprung from the patient, incessant, and progressive penetration into the law of resonance, that is to say, from the successive exploitation of the octave, the fifth and the fourth (ninth to twelfth century), the third (thirteenth to sixteenth century), the seventh (seventeenth and eighteenth century), the major ninth, the augmented fifth, and the perfect eleventh (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) . . . . this evolution . . . . constitutes, at the same time, the only true justification of the musical art.
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Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.
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Our sensitivity to changes of pitch ... is underused in musical sound. Western music, in particular, is based on scales that use pitch changes that are at least twenty times bigger than the smallest changes that we could perceive. If we used our discriminatory power to full, we could generate an undulating sea of sound that displayed continuously changing frequency rather like the undersea sonic songs of dolphins and whales.
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Our study adds relatively little to the volumes that have been written about the digital transition in the music industry - often held up as the "canary in the coal mine" for other media markets. We share the increasingly consensual view that the situation is better understood as a crisis of the high-margin CD business-and of the "big four" record labels (EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, the Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group), which have relied nearly exclusively on it for their profits - rather than a crisis of the music business in general. The decline in this side of the business had, without doubt, been precipitious (see figure 1.3). According to the IFPI, global recorded music sales dropped from $33.7 bilion in 001 to $18.4 bilion in 2008 - almost entirely attributable to the decine of CD sales. In the United States, CD sales fell from $7 bilion in 2004 to $3.1 billin in 2008 - a stuation somewhat mitigated by the rise in digital sales from zero to $1.8 billion in that period. Recorded music sales in most other countries have been in similar free fall. Between 2004 and 2008, Brazilian recorded music sales shrank from $399 million to $179 million; Russian sales dropped from $352 million to $221 million; sales in Mexico from $ 237 million to $145 million. In South Africa, considered a bright spot in international sales, sales grew through 2007 - peaking at $129 million before falling to $199 million in 2008.
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Paul Hindemith (1952: 72). A Composer's World. Cambridge, Mass.
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People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them—that does not occur to them.
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Performance art
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Pete Townshend of the Who, Pop Chronicles, Show 23 - Smack Dab in the Middle on Route 66. Part 2, interview recorded in London 2.5.1968 [2]
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Peter Newell, Her Polka Dots.
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Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene A Village Feast.
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Piano
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Plato, Protagoras in Protagoras 347c, Benjamin Jowett, trans
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Plato, The Republic, Book 3
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Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!Ply all your changes, all your swells,Play uppe "The Brides of Enderby."
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Preposterous ass, that never read so farTo know the cause why music was ordain'd!Was it not to refresh the mind of man,After his studies or his usual pain?