Quotes from Joseph Kerman

Schoenberg came to the crisis of modernism from a standpoint diametrically opposed to that of Schenker and Tovey: not with his finger in the dyke but with his whole frame spreadeagled on a board swept along by the surf of history.

Concerto soloists need applause. Though virtue is said to be its own reward, no one ever said that about virtuosity.

Not even the stretto fugues of The Art of Fugue are as single-minded as the Fugue in C Major, whose twenty-seven bars include no episodes and, apart from subject entries, no more than a total of two bars of transitional music preparing the fugue's three cadences . . . plus a miniature peroration in which the whole thing gently goes up in smoke, up to a high C we have never heard before.