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# Weekend Words: Sound
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-sound/
- Published: 2013-08-11T13:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:34:51.000Z
- Description: 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?"
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:59 (2012, 2013, part 2)

![Gerrit Dou, "Trumpet-Player in Front of a Banquet" (1660–65), oil on wood, 38 x 29 cm (Musée du Louvre, Paris, image via Web Gallery of Art)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/08/dou-trumpet.jpg)

Gerrit Dou, “Trumpet-Player in Front of a Banquet” (1660–65), oil on wood, 38 x 29 cm (Musée du Louvre, Paris, image via Web Gallery of Art)

Yesterday, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened [*Soundings: A Contemporary Score*](http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1379?ref=hyperallergic.com), 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**