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Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709), line 418.
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Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), Epistle IV, line 143.
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Alexander Pope, Ode on St. Cecilia's Day.
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Alexander Pope, Ode on St. Cecilia's Day.
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Alexander Pope, Ode on St. Cecilia's Day.
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Alfred Noyes, Apes and Ivory.
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Alfred Noyes, Barrel Organ.
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Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King (published 1859-1885), Merlin and Vivien, line 393.
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Alfred Tennyson, The Lotos Eaters, Choric Song, Stanza 1.
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Alfred Tennyson, The Lotos Eaters, Choric Song, Stanza 1.
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All aspects of musical practice may be disengaged, and privileged, in order to give birth to new forms of variation: variations on the relationships between the composer and the performer, between the conductor and the performer, between the performers, between the performer and the listener, variations upon gestures, variations on silence that end in a mute music that is still music because it preserves still something of the musical totality of the tradition...all elements belonging to the total musical fact may be separated and taken as a strategic variable of musical production. This autonomization serves as true musical experimentation: little by little, the individual variables that make up a total musical fact are brought to light. Any particular music then appears as one that has made a choice among these variables, and that has privileged a certain number of them. Under these conditions, musical analysis would have to begin by recognizing the strategic variables characteristic of a given musical system: musical invention and musical analysis lend each other mutual aid.
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All music is just performances of 4'33" in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time.
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Ancient belief in a cosmos composed of spheres, producing music as angels guided them through the heavens, was still flourishing in Elizabethan times. ...There is a good deal more to Pythagorean musical theory than celestial harmony. Besides the music of the celestial spheres (musica mundana), two other varieties of music were distinguished: the sound of instruments...(musica instrumentalis), and the continuous unheard music that emanated from the human body (musica humana), which arises from a resonance between the body and the soul. ...In the medieval world, the status of music is revealed by its position within the Quadrivium—the fourfold curriculum—alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Medieval students... believed all forms of harmony to derive from a common source. Before Boethius' studies in the ninth century, the idea of musical harmony was not considered independently of wider matters of celestial or ethical harmony.
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And hears thy stormy music in the drum!
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And in their motions harmony divineSo smoothes her charming tones, that God's own earListens delighted.