“Modern European composers…have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.”

—  George Gershwin

Page 386
The Composer in the Machine Age (1933)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Modern European composers…have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age Americ…" by George Gershwin?
George Gershwin photo
George Gershwin12
American composer and pianist 1898–1937

Related quotes

Terry Winograd photo

“What surprised me, which Google was part of, is that superficial search techniques over large bodies of stuff could get you what you wanted. I grew up in the AI tradition, where you have a complete conceptual model, and the information retrieval tradition, where you have complex vectors of key terms and Boolean queries. The idea that you can index billions of pages and look for a word and get what you want is quite a trick. To put it in more abstract terms, it's the power of using simple techniques over very large numbers versus doing carefully constructed systematic analysis.”

Terry Winograd (1946) American computer scientist

"Talking with Terry Winograd" http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/t_winograd_1.html, Ubiquity 3 (23), 29 July 2002.

Jackson Pollock photo

“Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we're living in... All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, p. 140

Sergei Rachmaninoff photo

“I can respect the artistic aim of a composer if he arrives at the so-called modern idiom after an intense period of preparation…Such composers know what they are doing when they break a law; they know what to react against, because they have had experience in the classical forms and style. Having mastered the rules, they know which can be violated and which should be obeyed. But, I am sorry to say, I have found too often that young composers plunge into the writing of experimental music with their school lessons only half learned. Too much radical music is sheer sham, for this very reason: its composer sets about revolutionizing the laws of music before he learned them himself.”

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) Russian composer, pianist, and conductor

Interviewed by David Ewen in The Etude, 1941; cited from Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern Universities Press, 1997) pp. 235-6

George W. Bush photo

“America's rich musical heritage reflects the diversity of our people. Among many influences, the cultural traditions brought to this land from Africa more than four centuries ago and the remarkable musical achievements of African Americans since then have strongly and unmistakably improved the sound of American music.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Black Music (June 2001)

Chris Martin photo

“It’s more egalitarian on the Internet, anyone can put anything up. But in terms of the money it takes to allow a band to get good, there’s less of it to invest. Music is split up now into little pockets.”

Chris Martin (1977) musician, co-founder of Coldplay

https://www.spin.com/2011/10/chris-martins-quiet-riot/?amp=1 source

“In applications of the music-as-language metaphor we should attend to diverse musical traditions in musical terms, including not only traditions of the music we study but also traditions of how we study music.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Language Models and Musical Analysis", p.54-55.

Georges Braque photo

“You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does, if you like... There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1946 - 1963, Cahiers d'art', 1954, p. 16

Igor Stravinsky photo

“The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.”

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Russian composer, pianist and conductor

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (1962). Expositions and Developments.
1960s

Ernest Flagg photo

“A Greek architect of the great epoch would no more have thought of omitting the mark of the harmonic scale of proportion, on which the design was based, than would the composer of music think of omitting the harmonic scale of his composition.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Source: Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922), Ch. II

“A unitary method of thought is indispensable to the interpretation of European history. The pervasive dualisms which distort the thought of western man are an element in this general condition, which therefore must be diagnosed in a language which does not take these dualisms for granted. No interpretation of European man in traditional European terms can bring the truth to light, any more than the color-blind can know their deficiency.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 25

Related topics