Quotes About Interpretation

But in the end, one-sided views make for pretty flat-looking works of art.

Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence.

When asked, 'What did you want to say in this work?' he would answer, 'I've said what I've said.' This made sense in where everyone assumed music had a meaning - but where saying the wrong thing could get a person killed. -Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

Durant les longues nuits et les longues journées passées sous l'effet de la cocaïne dans la chambre de Yag, il me vint à l'esprit que ce qui importe à l'homme ce ne sont pas les événements survenus dans sa vie, mais seulement les répercussions de ces événements dans sa conscience.... ...L'homme vit donc non des événements du monde qui l'entoure mais des reflets de ces événements dans sa conscience.

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

Perception of a state is not the state.

History is politics projected into the past.

Well, evil to some is always good to others." —Jane Austen, Emma

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

Coxeter also wrote a long mathematical explanation in his letter, which was beyond Escher's comprehension, as he remarked in a letter to George and Corrie. Baarn, 28 May 1960: 'I had an enthusiastic letter from Coexter about my coloured fish, which I sent him. Three pages of explanation of what I actually did... It's a pity that I understand nothing, absolutely nothing of it...

Learning 'yes' and 'no' gave them at least twenty minutes' worth of entertainment because mood-shading them could turn 'yes' into 'no, you bastard' and 'no' into 'maybe,' 'I'm only fake-saying no,' and variations of 'hells, no' that felt completely different from saying 'hells no' in any other language.

The hand that records is also what makes everything unclear.

He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says.

There is no way to write a biography of Shostakovich without relying on hearsay and relaying the memories of people who have many private reasons to fabricate, mislead, and revise.

This interpretation became popular many decades later, after the publication of Solomon Volkov's supposed memoirs of Shostakovich, Testimony. In that book, Volkov has Shostakovich say, The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler's attack.

So what were people getting so excited about? What was this symphony saying to them? We are still arguing about that a whole human lifetime later. Audiences are still trying to decipher the codes in Shostakovich's symphonies, trying to see under the masks he wore to the true face we expect to find beneath. "It's very difficult to speak through a mask," as the writer Viktor Shklovsky said, but "only a few can play themselves without it.

As musicologist Richard Taruskin has said, "What made Shostakovich's music the secret diary of a nation was not only what he put into it, but what it allowed listeners to draw out.

As one Shostakovich biographer put it, "Testimony is a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich. It just isn't a genuine one.

It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich's words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains. Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.

The moment Shostakovich spoke over the radio, the story of the Seventh Symphony started to sparkle and to effervesce into myth. It became a public story used by others for their own ends. This does not mean that people lied — but people blurred details; they tugged; they nudged.

Yes. Just think: the literal meaning of the Chinese characters for "revolution" is "elimination of life".

Ninguna palabra está completa / ni siquiera en alemán que las tiene tan grandes.

How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before