Harold Powers: Criticism

Harold Powers was American academic. Explore interesting quotes on criticism.

Harold Powers: 16 quotes0 likes

“Objective' analysis is a tool, primarily useful for suggesting or confirming putative relationships between different musical styles….'Critical' analysis results not in a statistical measurement of style or proof of relationship but rather, ideally, in a formal model for a relatively independent and artistically controllable style within a culture, and should then be viable for accounting for individual manifestations of that style…”

“No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But…the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between present sensibility and the general sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, allowing for an ever-evolving dialogue between the vanished past and the evanescent present.”

Harold Powers, "Reading Mozart's Music", p.43.

“[A. Merriam] neglects to take sufficiently into account the possibilities of critical musical analysis as though from within the culture, be it by a native or a native-trained foreigner.”

Harold Powers, review of A. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music, p.171, 167.