“I demand of art that it be life”
The most beautiful pictures, the most swelling tones, form a group and then dissolve. Only one thing remains: an unending beauty which passes from one form to another, eternally revealed, eternally unchanged. Of course we can’t always hold them fast and place them in museums and reduce them to manuscript paper, and then lead the young and old there to see them and lecture to boys and old men about them and let them go into ecstasies. One must love mankind in order to penetrate the particular existence of each thing; there must be nothing too common or too ugly. Only then can they be understood.[1]
– Georg Büchner
FOOTNOTE
1. Georg Büchner, “Lenz” in Complete Plays and Prose. Carl Richard Mueller, trans. New York: Hill & Wang, 1963, p. 151.
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 3
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Contents
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents
For more on Glenn Branca, see:
Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition
Music Book: Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers
Music Lecture: The Secret of 20th-Century American Music
Music: KALW Radio Show #1, A Few of My Favorite Things…
Music: SFCR Radio Show #7, Postmodernism, part 4: Three Contemporary Masters
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 