Quotes About Counterpoint

I have been listening to the cats in the courtyard. They are all singing Rossini. It is obvious that cats have declined as badly as composers. Domenico Scarlatti owned one which would actually stroll across the keyboard and pick out passable subjects for fugue. But that was a Spanish cat of the Enlightenment. It appreciated counterpoint. Nowadays all cats appreciate are coloratura. Like the rest of the Public.

Whatever comes under the heading of fugal form partakes in some way of the nature of a fugue. You already know, I feel sure, that in texture all fugues are polyphonic or contrapuntal (the terms are identical in meaning). Therefore, it follows that all fugal forms are polyphonic or contrapuntal in texture.

Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God—al-Dhat—is feminine.

I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life.

The popularity of yoga arises not only because of its talent for undoing stress but because its traditions make an engaging counterpoint to modern life. It's unplugged and natural, old and centered—a kind of anti-civilization pill that can neutralize the dissipating influence of the Internet and the flood of information we all face. Its ancient serenity offers a new kind of solace.

In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.

Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa—Who knows most, knows least.

I really like it when movies take a song and use it to counterpoint a scene.

Counterpoint is difficult. I have been doing it since the beginning of my career. But it is not just taking any opposite. It is finding the right opposite.

Bechet even briefly played with Duke, and Ellington would take the counterpoint, romance, and beats of New Orleans music and build a compositional cathedral.

Tart pomegranates that pop in your mouth make the perfect counterpoint to roasted chicken and salty-creamy feta cheese.

She heard melody and harmony and counterpoint; he heard something calling him from far, far away.

Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.

What seems not yet to have been sufficiently explored is the emancipating potential of the discursive form of psychoanalysis in politics as a counterpoint of marketing.

The way Fatboy Slim layers motifs is the same as 18th-century baroque counterpoint. You have an idea, then you have an answer to the idea in another voice, then you have a counter idea accompanying the original idea, and you build up your texture like that. I'm really into Kruder and Dorfmeister at the moment, and they do the same thing.

'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.

Once music is detached from function, once it becomes a repertory art, it explicitly strives to define itself, out of itself, to become "mathemat- ical"—that is to say, to begin from premises and proceed to conclusions by interpreting its own universe, finding its own laws. Systems of harmony and counterpoint become tools for elaborate musical explorations. A great deal of Western music is as much a manifestation of idealism as is mathematics.

True love is your souls recognition of its counterpoint in another.

I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.

Too much counterpoint; what is worse, Protestant counterpoint.

A prize-winning science reporter, Simons had become the number-two editor at the Post a year before. An intent, sensitive man with a large nose, thin face and deep-set eyes, he looks like the kind of Harvard teaching assistant who carries a slide ruler strapped to his belt. But he is skillful with fragile egos, and also the perfect counterpoint to Bradlee. Bradlee is more like Woodward: he wants hard information first and is impatient with theories. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.

You can do gross-out until the cows come home but if there isn't something to balance it, then it's not going to work at all.

The apologists have shot themselves in the foot.