Musicologist Quotes

The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.

Wherever there are four walls, consciousness of direction is far keener.

In dance, even the weakest can do wonders.

Rhythmic motion has become the carrier and creator of almost every ecstatic mood of any significance in human life.

The adult who puts his arm around his companion in the ballroom, and the child in the roadway, skipping in a round dance - they forget themselve, they dissolve the weight of earthly contact and the rigidity of daily existence. The soul slips into a twilight stage.

Music as a whole, in its overwhelming wealth and endlessness, is inaccessible unless we free ourselves from the limitations of our own restricted training.

If you ask an Auin Bushman what realty happens at the puberty ceremonials, he will tell you, "We dance." In the initiation customs of all peoples the dances play an especially important part. The dance is the center of wedding festivities.

Tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire.

Sexuality ... is at the same time the most personal of realms and also the realm most carefully constrained by social order.

Most people have music in the center of their lives.

I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential.

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth [Symphony of Beethoven] is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.

The dance is the mother of the arts, The dance breaks down the distinction of body & soul.

The dance lives in all mankind as a necessary motor-rhythmic expression of excess energy and the joy of living.

The peoples influenced by the animal dance have a variety of movements and dance with enthusiasm; those who do not know the animal dance have few movements and show little zest for dancing.

In Europe we have the "loss of self" motif clearly illustrated in the whirl dances of the Russians sects of the Molokani in Armenia....All the countries that bordered the Meditteranean in ancient times, and the less remote sections of Asia as well, appear to have had whirl dances.

It removes the limitations of his body, extinguishes his consciousness, and pours the divine spirit into him. The whirl dance is the purest form of dance devotion.

Every dance is and gives ecstasy.

The superhuman power which exhiliration and hypnosis bring to a dancer is shown especially clearly in his almost inconceivable staying powers in a state of high tension. "In the dance even the weakest can do wonders."

A person can be danced. In all continents the dancers carry little children on their shoulders.

In the earliest cultures any tie between the dancers is slight.

In a higher level the choral dancers almost always touch one another and thus force themselves into the same stride and the same movement. The closer the contact, the stronger is the social character of the choral.

The oldest form of the Choral Dance is the circle.

Even the chimpanzees dance in a circle, and people of every continent still do it.

Although the circle dance is known throughout the entire world, the front dance is limited to the cultures of which the rectangular hut is a part.

The dance in which the men form one row, the women another, and dance with and opposite each other in a form of love play, is widely diffused and may be confidentally assigned to a Protoneolithic culture level.

The only information we have about the early history of the dance comes to us from the rock paintings created by primitive man tens of thousands of years ago in what is now France.

Whatever the nature of dance, it needs no onlooker, not even a single witness.

The English dance unites the guests of an evening by the spell of rhythmical movement into a chance casual community.

A choral dance: an attempt to impose upon a chance gathering of a few dozen guests a communal feeling.

Only the tango has continued to enjoy undiminished favor for more than twenty years in spite of polishing and refinement. To be sure, it is no pure Negro dance and owes its best qualities to the unusual dance talents of the Spaniards.

To the large extent that music can organize our perceptions of our own bodies and emotions, it can tell us things about history that are not accessible through any other medium.