Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound..

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings ….

On the one hand it is said that the aim and object of music is to excite emotions, i.e., pleasurable emotions; on the other hand, the emotions are sa….

So long as we refuse to include lottery tickets among the symphonies, or medical bulletins among the overtures, we must refrain from treating the emo….

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination..

That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit ….

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear..

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the b….

The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire ….

You cannot imagine the wild enthusiasm that these two men created in Vienna. Newspapers went into raptures over each new waltz, and innumerable artic….

The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel..