“If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment — twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.”

—  Theodor W. Adorno

Philosophy of Modern Music (1973) as translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster

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Theodor W. Adorno 90
German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for … 1903–1969

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“If…[Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partitionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Page 98
See: Common practice period, Twelve-tone technique
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“Rest springs from strife and dissonant chords beget
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Lewis Morris (poet) (1833–1907) Welsh poet in the English language

Love's Suicide, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“They say that, hung in ancient halls,
At midnight from the silent lute
A melancholy music falls
From chords which were by daylight mute.
And so the human heart by night
Is touched by some inspired tone,
Harmonious in the deep delight,
By day it knew not was its own.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

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“By the time of his Fourth String Quartet, inversional symmetry had become as fundamental a premise of Bartók's harmonic language as it is of the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Neither he nor they ever realized that this connection establishes a profound affinity between them in spite of the stylistic features that so obviously distinguish his music from theirs…Nowhere does he [Bartók] recognize the communality of his harmonic language with that of the twelve-tone composers that is implied in their shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

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“the search for meaning is really the search for the lost chord. When the lost chord is discovered by humankind, the discord in the world will be healed and the symphony of the universe will come into complete harmony with itself.”

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Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

“The pre-World War I works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, "give a glimpse of a new universe of emancipated discourse, unfortunately quickly abandoned when Schoenberg returned to the classical musical shapes upon adopting the twelve-tone system."”

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) American composer

Elliott Carter (1977). The Writings of Elliott Carter, p.186. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cited in Albright, Daniel (2004). Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012670.

Jean-Philippe Rameau photo

“Therefore we well observe that the title of perfect cadence is attached only to a dominant that progresses to the main tone, because this dominant, which is naturally contained within the harmony of the main tone, seems, when it progresses to it, to return as if to its source.”

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) French composer and music theorist of the Baroque era

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Paul Signac photo

“We have never heard Seurat, Cross, Luce, Van de Velde or indeed Van Rysselberghe or Angrand speak of dots. We have never seen them be preoccupied by Pointillism. Read these lines, dictated by Seurat to Jules Christophe, his biographer: 'Art is harmony; harmony is the analogy between opposites and between similar elements of tone, tint and line. By tone I mean light and dark; tint is red and its complementary: green, orange and its complementary: blue, yellow and its complementary: purple... The method of expression relies on the optical mixture of tones, tints and their reactions”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

shadows that follow very strict rules
Quote from Maria Buszek, online - note 22 http://mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/Expressionism/Readings/SignacDelaNeo.pdf
Seurat's quote from: Jules Christophe, Seurat, in 'Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui', no. 368, March-April 1890
From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, 1899

Tiësto photo

“I integrate music from all over the world in my sets, harmony is what my music and life are built upon.”

Tiësto (1969) Dutch DJ and record producer

Tiësto.
Source: [WE8 Coca-Cola Campaign, http://www.coca-cola.com/template1/index.jsp?locale=en_US&site=../we8/we8.jsp, Coca Cola, 2008-08-02]

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“[Before]
Just two or three sweet chords, that seemed
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Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

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