Weekend Words: Sound
Yesterday, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened Soundings: A Contemporary Score, the museum's first major exhibition of sound art. But will it answer the question, "If a piece of art falls in the forest and no one hears it, is it still art?"
Yesterday, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened Soundings: A Contemporary Score, the museum’s first major exhibition of sound art. But will it answer the question, “If a piece of art falls in the forest and no one hears it, is it still art?”
“It starts with a single sound. If there’s something in that sound, then it’s worth continuing.”
—Steve Lacy
“Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna:”
—Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”
“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”
—Lewis Mumford
“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
“All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
—Voltaire
“If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.”
—Alfred Hitchcock
“Words cannot express quite a lot of feelings, whereas a noise or tone or drone or sound, an accordion falling down a staircase, can somehow capture an emotion much better.”
—John Lydon
“The wind is a very difficult sound to get. It’s always changing.”
Don Van Vliet
“I have been told Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”
—Edgar Wilson Nye
“The blues – the sound of a sinner on revival day.”
—W.C. Handy
“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
—W.H. Auden
