Webern Quotes

• [Charlie "Bird" Parker] would sit down and ask [Phil Wood], "What do you think about this whole secondary Viennese school with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern? Are you listening to that music and what do you feel about it?" These were the conversations that he was having. And he also said, what he learned from Charlie Parker was, not that he studied with him in the formal sense, is that the first thing that Charlie Parker would always ask was, "Did you eat today?".

  Jon Gordon

  School, Thinking, Bird

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• This is positively not an album to play while you do a doctorate thesis on "Bergson, Webern and Charles the Vicious, Paradox or Ambiguity?"

  Bob Brookmeyer

  Music, Play, Albums

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• Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels ... , or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music.

  Frank Zappa

  Jewels, Differences, Listening

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.34, Simon and Schuster

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• [the impression of the first time I heard Webern's music in a concert performance] was the same as I was to experience a few years later when I first laid eyes on a Mondriaan canvas...: those things, of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality

  Anton Webern

  Eye, Reality, Years

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• If... [Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes.

  George Perle

  Class, Tone, Twelve

  "The Listening Composer". Book by George Perle, p. 98, 1990.

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• You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."

  David Longstreth

  Thinking, Sitting, Done

  "Dirty Projectors". Interview with Brandon Stosuy, pitchfork.com. July 2, 2012.

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