Interval Quotes - page 4
You see the rivers running east. Then you see mountains rise. Rivers run off them to the west. Mountains come up like waves. They crest, break, and spread themselves westward. When they are spent, there is an interval of time, and then again you see the rivers running eastward. You look over the shoulder of the painter and you see all that in the landscape. You see it if first you have seen it in the rock. The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts, the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years.
John McPhee
Z-relation, or rather, "that certain pitch-class collections share the same 'interval vector' even though they are neither transpositionally nor inversionally equivalent was first pointed out by Howard Hanson in Harmonic Materials of Modern Music (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960), p. 22, and by David Lewin in "Re: The Intervallic Content of a Collection of Notes," Journal of Music Theory 4:1 (1960). For a general criticism of Forte's concepts of pitch-class set equivalence see Perle, "Pitch-Class Set Analysis: An Evaluation," Journal of Musicology 8:2 (1990).
George Perle
Do we really have to look these chords up in Forte's catalog in order to find a name for them? Another theorist [Christopher Hasty] assures us that, 'Allen Forte's perceptive interpretation...accounts for an essential quality of this mysteriously pulsating music. The eighth-note chords of the flute and clarinets form alternately, with the sustaining oboes and horns, the six-tone sonorities labeled A and B. The sonorities A and B are both representatives of the same set class (6-Z19) and are thus made up of precisely the same intervals. As Forte points out, "There is a flucuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant."' 'A fluctuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant' is what the rest of us have always known as 'a transposition.'
George Perle
It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
William Faulkner
You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.
Zhuangzi
The fate of the Statute of Uses is one of the most curious in legal history. Its secret and unavowed purpose, of securing the estates of the monasteries for the Crown, it accomplished. Its ostensible purpose, fortified by a wealth of hypocritical justification, it entirely failed to achieve. Not only were devises of lands, after a brief interval, put on a legal footing; but, as is well known, uses of lands as distinguished from legal estates, soon re-appeared in full vigour. Whilst in unforeseen directions, that statute worked havoc in the medieval system of conveyancing; and gradually modernized it out of existence.
Edward Jenks
The interval during which a painting is mistaken for the real thing, or a real thing for a painting, is the triumphant moment of trompe l'oeil art. The artist appears to be potent as nature, if not superior to it. Almost immediately, though, the spectator's uncertainty is eliminated by his recognition that the counterfeit is counterfeit. Once the illusion is dissolved, what is left is an object that is interesting not as a work of art but as a successful simulation of something that is not art. The major response to it is curiosity: "How did he do it?"
Harold Rosenberg
The Napoleonic war (1803–15) that followed the brief interval of the Peace of Amiens, was for us a war waged in self-defence, to prevent the systematic subordination of Europe to a vigorous military despotism sworn to our destruction. A few months at the Foreign Office in 1806 and an attempt to treat with our adversary for peace, made this clear even to Fox, who had been till then singularly blind to the real character of Bonaparte. But the Whigs were only enthusiastic for the war by fits and starts. The honour of beating Napoleon fell as clearly to the Tories, as the honour of beating Louis XIV had fallen to the Whigs.
G. M. Trevelyan
As an atheist, Suzuki declares, he has no illusions about life and death, adding that the individual is insignificant in cosmic terms. Human beings must come to terms with the unbearable reality that they, like all life, will be extinguished.
What he finds most difficult, he confides, "is the idea that this guy looking back at me in the mirror, this person locked into my skull full of memories that make him who he is, this fellow who has known pain, joy, thoughts, having existed for such a brief flash in all eternity, is going to vanish forever at his death. Forever is such a long time, and 70, 80, 90, even 100 years is such a tiny interval in all of time."
David Suzuki
Only the final results can prove whether military autocracies or Parliamentary Governments are more likely - take them for all in all - to preserve the welfare and safety of great nations. If the result is inconclusive, the conflict will be renewed after an uneasy interval. But when an absolute decision is obtained the system of the victors - whoever they are - will probably be adopted to a very great extent by the vanquished.
Winston Churchill
We ourselves become the bridges out over the interval that is the world and time. It is a daring thing to fling ourselves out over that void that is black and scarlet below and green and gold above. A bridge does not abandon its first shore when it grows out in spans towards the further one.
R. A. Lafferty
