Polachek, Hegel, Boulanger on Music

Singer Caroline Polachek says to Oneohtrix Point Never, an American experimental electronic music producer

One of the amazing lessons that we’ve all learned from Lana [Del Rey is how hyper-economical you can be when you be when you deploy pastiche, because you can very effectively in a few words or a few sounds, trigger a whole array of feelings that other artists — over the course of decades — have painstakingly created. It’s an efficiency of communication.

For interview Magazine, March 2023, issue 547.

Ernst Fischer, an Austrian poet, quotes Hegel, a philosopher

But to what purpose? ‘It is the nature of music,’ says Hegel, ‘ to put soul…into sounds arranged in particular tone relations and, to that extent, to elevate expression into an element made only by art and for art alone.

From the Necessity of Art, first published 1959.

Music teacher and conductor Nadia Boulanger, who trained many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century

Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I’d go so far as to say life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

music as a form of bourgeois self-expression
music as a form of bourgeois self-expression by AI.