'… in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions of burgers sold…'

'Since serialism is an organization of all the octave-classes, the presence of an octave when each note comes from a distinct, separate version of the series creates generally an unacceptable confusion. It threatens the method of organization itself, occasions a mistake in grammar so serious as to destroy sense. The prohibition of such octaves is part of a larger principle of nonredundancy. This does not ban the repetition of a note. What it bans is the return of a note in such a context as to imply the disruption of the series. For example, the first note of one form of a series may be repeated as often as a composer likes, provided it always sounds like the first note (in other words, as though the note was sustained with intermittences); it must not sound as if it had a second position in the series.'

'In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.'

'The first dimension of silence captures the meaningful silence of the musical language. Unable to speak discursively or conceptually, music, Schopenhauer argues, nonetheless speaks—and it speaks not merely volumes but "everything." One purpose of my inquiry is to unravel in Schopenhauerean terms the apparent paradox that the fine art of sound is essentially silent, or that the purpose of the musical art is to express the inexpressible.

The second dimension of silence is a meta- or philosophical silence. It captures the inability of philosophy—at least in its traditional forms—to adequately describe the musical art. This silence derives from philosophy's own theoretical limits. Another purpose of my inquiry is to highlight how necessarily dependent Schopenhauer's philosophy of music is upon indirect, analogical description. Apart from the undoubted and explicit influence of Plato and Kant upon Schopenhauer's metaphysics, Schopenhauer works also within an age-old tradition of German anagogical mysticism and philosophical anxiety that utilizes claims of transcendence to find a sacred realm or refuge for the individual, be it in God or music. Like Augustine, but more explicitly like Aquinas, Schopenhauer demonstrates the use to which arguments by analogy (comparison, proportion, and negation) can be put if philosophers are to say anything about that which, in the strictly philosophical terms of rational explanation, cannot be spoken about.'

'On attaché trop d'importance à l'écriture musicale, à la formule et au métier! On n'écoute pas autour de soi les milles bruits de la nature, on ne guette pas assez cette musique si variée qu'elle nous offre avec tant d'abondance. Elle nous enveloppe, et nous avons vécu au milieu d'elle jusqu'à présent sans nous en apercevoir.'

'What needs more scrutiny is how writers turned to the music of their own time—music often infiltrated with noise—as they rethought the form and the cultural potential of their craft. Cowell knew that the word "noise" could not be applied so insouciantly to the musical world he inhabited—in fact, he put his musical gifts to satirical effect in setting this Boston Herald doggerel, along with two other similar verses, in his Three Anti-Modernist Songs (1938). Well before Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète experiments with edited tape-recorded sounds (Cinq études de bruits; 1948), musicians were composing through the sounds of air-raid sirens, trains, typewriters, propellers, pianolas, recorded birdsong, radio static, and (perhaps most ominously) radio silence. Noise thereby took on new aesthetic and cultural resonances, as a concept and a sonic material. For Cowell, Antheil, Stravinsky, Varèse, and Satie, among others, the musical use of noise could potentially serve a disruptive and a beautiful function in the concert hall.

For these composers, and for the writers listening to them, it became a principal project of modern art to figure out what would "count" as music or noise, and what was aesthetically or culturally at stake in pressing that question. As noise made its way not only into avant-garde efforts to destroy art's sublimity (Dadaist sound poetry, Luigi Russolo's Futurist Arte Dei Rumori [Art of Noises; 1973], Alexander Mosolov's musical imitation of a factory in Iron Foundry [1927]), but also into the productions of what we retroactively call "high modernism," the very boundaries of the autonomous artwork seemed to be building up and decomposing at every turn. As composers put these real-world sounds into dialogue with melody, harmony, rhythm, and (a)tonality, and as writers critiqued or aspired to the musical arts, modernists came to contend with music and noise as interrelated categories of sound, art, and culture. And as audiences reacted vituperatively to new music—as in the riots at Stravinsky's Sacre, Antheil's Ballet, Satie's Parade, and the 1913 "Skandalkonzert" of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—noise seemed increasingly symptomatic of a shifting interactive relationship between stage and audience.

Without noise, music, or combinations thereof, little is left of European, Anglo-American, and Anglo-Irish modernism. Without literal or figurative gestures to noise, there is no Duchamp, Kandinsky, or Mondrian, no Brecht or Beckett, no Langston Hughes, no William Carlos Williams (I stop short of John Cage, for reasons I shall explain). Without gestures to musical rhythm, syncopation, consonance, dissonance, and tactical silence, there is no Auden, H.D., Toomer, Proust, Lawrence, Yeats, Cunard, Stevens, or Stein (who describes the Rite premiere to great effect in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). Put more baldly, a twentieth-century world without noise would make it difficult to articulate the value of music.'

'The silence that will greet tonight's performance while it is in progress suggests a different attitude. Those who wish perfect communion with the composer through the performance can have it, uninterrupted by any noise that may signal the presence of other spectators. On the other hand, while our attention is without a doubt active, it is detached; we no longer feel ourselves to be part of the performance but listen to it as it were from the outside. Any noise we might make would not be an element of the performance, as were the sighs and murmurs of the Parisian audience, but an interruption or a distraction. I have even known the minute clinks and jingles of a female listener's charm bracelet to put its wearer's neighbor in a rage.

Who we are, then, is spectators rather than participants, and our silence during the performance is a sign of this contradiction, that we have nothing to contribute but our attention to the spectacle that has been arranged for us. We might go further and say that we are spectators at a spectacle that is not ours, that our relationship with those who are responsible for the production of the spectacle—the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, and those who make the arrangements for tonight's concert—is that of consumers to producers, and our only power is that of consumers in general, to buy or not to buy.

Other kinds of performance conjure up other kinds of behavior, other kinds of relationships. Many reveal a complex ambivalence about their ideal relationships that can tell us much about the nature of musical performances and about the function that they serve in human life.'

'There is a way of telling intellectual history – the way I’ve been doing it – that makes it go on above our heads, instead of in them.'

'Friedrich Schlegel receives the revelation of the fragment, so to speak, from the first publication of Chamfort's Pensées, Maximes et Anecdotes, which was published posthumously in 1795. Through Chamfort, the genre and the motif of the fragment refer to the entire "tradition" of English and French moralists (let us say, to retain only two symptomatic names, Shaftesbury and La Rochefoucauld), which in turn, via publication, in complex conditions, of Pascal's Pensées, directs one back to the "genre" whose paradigm is established for all of modern history by Montaigne's Essays. We will need to return to the significance of this filiation, which we represent here in the broadest fashion. For the moment, however, let us observe that, along with the fragment, the romantics receive a heritage, the heritage of a genre that, at least externally, can be characterized by three traits: the relative incompletion (the "essay") or absence of discursive development (the "thought") of each of its pieces; the variety and mixture of objects that a single ensemble of pieces can treat; the unity of the ensemble, by contrast, constituted in a certain way outside the work, in a subject that is seen in it, or in the judgment that proffers its maxims in it. To underscore the importance of this heritage is not to belittle the originality of the romantics. On the contrary, one needs to understand it fully in order to grasp what the romantics had the originality to take to its conclusion: the very genre of originality, the genre, absolutely speaking, of the subject that cannot or can no longer conceive itself in the form of a Discourse on Method and that has not yet truly undertaken its reflection as a subject.'