Constant Lambert Quotes (13 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Constant Lambert: 13 quotes0 likes

Famous Constant Lambert Quotes

“The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm."”

Constant Lambert

Opera magazine, December 1950.

“Even in his palmiest days there were good friends who could stand only limited stretches of the Lambert barrage of ideas, jokes, fantasy, quotations, apt instances, things that had struck him as he walked through London, not because these lacked quality, on the contrary because the mixture was after a while altogether too rich.”

Constant Lambert

Anthony Powell Messengers of Day (1978) p. 60.
Criticism

“It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a faint period touch about Pacific 231 and Le Pas d'Acier. One feels…that Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and the Luddite riots; that Honegger should have been there to celebrate the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the death of Huskisson with a "Symphonie Triomphale et Funèbre".”

Constant Lambert

"Mechanical Romanticism", pp. 209-10.
Music, Ho! (1934)

“Lambert, who admired Duke Ellington and proclaimed his harmonic roots in Frederick Delius (who in his turn had taken them from Debussy), was a fearless reconciler of what the academies and Tin Pan Alley alike presumed to be eternally opposed…In 1972, on a plane from New York to Toronto, I found myself sitting next to Duke Ellington, who spoke almost with tears in his eyes of the stature of Lambert.”

Constant Lambert

Anthony Burgess Little Wilson and Big God ([1987] 1988) pp. 110-11.
Criticism

“The Appalling Popularity of Music.”

Constant Lambert

Source: Music, Ho! (1934), Chapter-heading, p. 200.

“The composer is now faced, not with further experiment but with the more difficult task of consolidating the experiments of this vertiginous period. He is like a man in a high-powered motor-car that has got out of control. He must either steer it away from the cliff's edge back to the road or leap out of it altogether. Most modern composers have chosen the latter plan, remarking, as they dexterously save their precious lives: "I think motor-cars are a little vieux jeu”

Constant Lambert

don't you?"
"The Age of Pastiche", p. 70.
Music, Ho! (1934)

“Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same.”

Constant Lambert

"The Revolutionary Situation", p. 31.
Music, Ho! (1934)

Constant Lambert Quotes about music

“To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, to those who expect a sinister frisson from modern music, it is my melancholy duty to point out that all the bomb throwing and guillotining has already taken place.”

Constant Lambert

"The Revolutionary Situation", p. 32.
Music, Ho! (1934)

“Music, from being an ordered succession of sounds, has become a matter of "sonorities", and anyone who can produce a brightly coloured brick of unusual shape is henceforth hailed as an architect.”

Constant Lambert

"Toute réaction est vraie", p. 91.
Music, Ho! (1934)

“The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.”

Constant Lambert

"The Conflict Between Nationalism and Form", p. 146.
Music, Ho! (1934)

Constant Lambert Quotes about time

“Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.”

Constant Lambert

"Music and the Naughty 'Nineties", p. 64.
Music, Ho! (1934)

“Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake.”

Constant Lambert

"The Revolutionary Situation", p. 31.
Music, Ho! (1934)

“There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached by Ravel towards the end of La Valse and towards the beginning of Bolero).”

Constant Lambert

"Exoticism and Low Life", p. 174.
Music, Ho! (1934)

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