“The best music always results from ecstasies of logic.”
Quoted by Donal Henahan in the New York Times Magazine, May 11, 1975.
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Alban Berg 2
Austrian composer 1885–1935Related quotes
“But bringing people together is what music has always done best.”
Source: Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut
Review of Magnolia in Chicago Sun-Times (7 January 2000) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/magnolia-2000
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film. … The movie is an interlocking series of episodes that take place during one day in Los Angeles, sometimes even at the same moment. Its characters are linked by blood, coincidence and by the way their lives seem parallel. Themes emerge: the deaths of fathers, the resentments of children, the failure of early promise, the way all plans and ambitions can be undermined by sudden and astonishing events. … All of these threads converge, in one way or another, upon an event there is no way for the audience to anticipate. This event is not "cheating," as some critics have argued, because the prologue fully prepares the way for it, as do some subtle references to Exodus. It works like the hand of God, reminding us of the absurdity of daring to plan. And yet plan we must, because we are human, and because sometimes our plans work out.
Magnolia is the kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy. At three hours it is even operatic in length, as its themes unfold, its characters strive against the dying of the light, and the great wheel of chance rolls on toward them.
“That’s what logic says. But I say, phooey, who wants logic? Not you, and not me. We want results.”
Source: The Heritage Universe, Summertide (1990), Chapter 13, “Summertide Minus Ten” (p. 150)
“Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.”
Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 77)