Frases de Harold Powers

“Los textos contrapuntísticos tienden a parecerse entre sí en los principios básicos de conducción de las voces que abrazan y en el tipo de ordenamientos de reglas que ofrecen, pero nadie podría acusar a los textos de la armonía, digamos, de Heinrich Schenker y Hugo Riemann, o de Allen Irvine McHose y Walter Piston - o para el caso, de Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, y Roger Sessions - de ser compatibles entre sí, ya sea en local o en la práctica.”

“Partiendo de mi creencia presente en el mayor rango de variabilidad en cuanto a orden y el tipo de complejidad en las músicas del mundo en comparación con las lenguas del mundo, no puedo imaginar cómo un modelo de desarrollo realmente satisfactorio para la explicación estructurada y detallada de un lenguaje musical es tan fácilmente modificada en otro, y más aún si el modelo original se desarrolló a partir de la lingüística y no de las disciplinas musicales.”

“Rules of simultaneous ensemble constraint can't be assumed a priori to be the kinds of rules or rest on the same foundations as rules for constraint on succession. They may well be similar, but they may well not be similar also. It seems to me that ensemble constraints must first be understood in their own terms, within musical cultures individually and comparitively, looking to what appear to be basic principles in each in light of the others, I would call such a study "comparative counterpoint.”

“Objective' analysis is a tool, primarily useful for suggesting or confirming putative relationships between different musical styles….'Critical' analysis results not in a statistical measurement of style or proof of relationship but rather, ideally, in a formal model for a relatively independent and artistically controllable style within a culture, and should then be viable for accounting for individual manifestations of that style…”

“A tonal type is minimally identifiable by its three markers and thus objectively observable completely apart from its musical or cultural context; it is 'scientific,' it is 'etic.' 'Mode' conversely is all bound up in sixteenth-century musical culture, not as a living doctrine of the music of the church and a heritage fomr the Middle Ages but also as a musical construct being expirimented with by members of the culture, from both humanistic and traditional points of view; it is thoroughly 'emic' and requires study on its own terms….”

“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.”

“Given my present belief in the much greater range of variability as to both order and kind of complexity in the world's musics versus the world's languages, I can hardly imagine how a model developed really satisfactorily for the detailed structureal explanation of one musical language is so easiy modified to another, and all the more so if the original model be evolved from linguistics rather than from the musical disciplines.”

“No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But…the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between present sensibility and the general sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, allowing for an ever-evolving dialogue between the vanished past and the evanescent present.”

“[A. Merriam] neglects to take sufficiently into account the possibilities of critical musical analysis as though from within the culture, be it by a native or a native-trained foreigner.”