Anton Webern Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

Unity is surely the indispensable thing if meaning is to exist. Unity, to be very general, is the establishment of the utmost relatedness between all component parts... the aim is to make as clear as possible the relationships between the parts of the unity; in short, to show how one thing leads to another.

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.

The time was simply ripe for the disappearance of tonality. Naturally this was a fierce struggle; inhibitions of the most frightful kind had to be overcome, the panic fear, 'Is that possible, then?' So it came about that gradually a piece was written, firmly and consciously, that wasn't in a definite key any more.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

[the impression of the first time I heard Webern's music in a concert performance] was the same as I was to experience a few years later when I first laid eyes on a Mondriaan canvas...: those things, of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality