George Steiner: Quotes about music

George Steiner was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on music.
George Steiner: 148   quotes 5   likes

“Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.”

George Steiner

"In a Post-Culture".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Books , World , Music , Winter

“Creation of absolutely the first rank — in philosophy, in music, in much of literature, in mathematics — continues to occur outside the American milieu. It is at once taken up and intelligently exploited, but the "motion of the spirit" has taken place elsewhere, amid the enervation of Europe, in the oppressive climate of Russia. There is, in a good deal of American intellectual, artistic production (recent paining may be a challenging exception) a characteristic near-greatness, a strength just below the best. Could it be that the United States is destined to be the "museum culture?"”

George Steiner

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Pain , Music , Intelligence , Literature

“Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien — the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive — tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 4 (p. 183).

God , Dreams , Music , Sense

“We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle, even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, on to realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. And we shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvellously rendered in Bartok's music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity.”

George Steiner

"Tomorrow"
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Dreams , Music , Reality

“For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 6 (p. 224).

Art , Music

“In the United States dramatically, here fortunately much less so, the book store as we have known it is dying. In the United States it is now largely an emporium, featuring music, records, Christmas cards, a large range fo semi-cultural and kitsch products with books fighting for their actual spatial lives. In some of the great university towns such as New Haven, or Princeton, within the past decade, the last good book stores have had to close, and what we have now are text book emporia which are not book stores, but store-houses bracketed according to set reading lists: in other words—where there is none of the genius of waste which a great book store has, where you cannot find what you are not looking for, which is the very essence of a book store.”

George Steiner

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 27.
Do Books Matter?

Books , Music , Universe , Reading

“For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 6 (p. 218).

Religion , Music

“The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 3 (p. 9).

Life , Music , Learning , Heart

“A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.”

George Steiner

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Music

“To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 38).

Art , Music , Literature , Appearance

“There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”

George Steiner

"A Death of Kings"
Extraterritorial (1971)

Age , Music , Mathematics

“All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 4 (p. 11).

Life , World , Art , Music