Anton Webern Quotes

#1. As regards the presentation of musical ideas, obviously rules of order soon appeared. Such rules of order have existed since music has existed and since musical ideas have been presented ... So we shall try to put our finger on the laws that must be at the bottom of this ...

Anton Webern

#2. What is music? Music is language. A human being wants to express ideas in this language, but not ideas that can be translated into concepts ...

Anton Webern

#3. Your ears will always lead you right, but you must know why.

Anton Webern

#4. Indeed, man only exists insofar as he expresses himself. Music does it in musical ideas.

Anton Webern

#5. So how do people listen to music? How do the broad masses listen to it? Apparently they have to be able to cling to pictures and 'moods' of some kind. If they can't imagine a green field, a blue sky or something of the sort, then they are out of their depth.

Anton Webern

#6. And the works that endure and will endure for ever, the great masterpieces, cannot have come into being as humanity ... imagines. Man is only the vessel into which is poured what "nature in general" wants to express.

Anton Webern

#7. Comprehensibility is the highest law of all. Unity must be there. There must be means of ensuring it. All the things familiar to us from primitive life must also be used in works of art.

Anton Webern

#8. From this simple phenomenon, this idea of saying something twice, more often, as often as possible, in order to make oneself understood - the most artful things developed ... the principle of repetition!

Anton Webern

#9. Music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing.

Anton Webern

#10. If you want to make something clear to someone, you mustn't forget the main point, the most important thing, and if you bring in something else as an illustration you mustn't wander off into endless irrelevancies.

Anton Webern

#11. Art is a product of nature in general, in the particular form of human nature.

Anton Webern

#12. Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

Anton Webern

#13. It's always the same: mediocrities are over-valued and great men are rejected.

Anton Webern

#14. Except for the violin pieces and a few of my orchestra pieces, all of my works from the Passacaglia on relate to the death of my mother.

Anton Webern

#15. The idea is distributed in space. It isn't only in one part; one part can't express the idea any longer, only the union of parts can completely express the idea. The idea found it necessary to be presented by several parts. After that, there was a rapid flowering of polyphony.

Anton Webern