Susan McClary famous quotes

Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential.
-- Susan McClary

#Music #Believe #Light

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth [Symphony of Beethoven] is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.
-- Susan McClary

#Symphony #Frustrated #Movement

Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence.
-- Susan McClary

#Feelings #Important #Desire

Tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire.
-- Susan McClary

#Mean #Expectations #Musical

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.
-- Susan McClary

#Symphony #Musical #Enlightenment

To the large extent that music can organize our perceptions of our own bodies and emotions, it can tell us things about history that are not accessible through any other medium.
-- Susan McClary

#Music #Perception #Body

Sexuality ... is at the same time the most personal of realms and also the realm most carefully constrained by social order.
-- Susan McClary

#Sex #Order #Social

Music is something that always lifts my spirits and makes me happy, and when I make music I always hope it will have the same effect on whoever listens to it.

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What's the buzz on the street with the kids? She's going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren't into Kiss. But they've all been told that it's the greatest show on Earth.

The focus on my appearance has really surprised me. I've always been a size 14 to 16, I don't care about clothes, I'd rather spend my money on cigarettes and booze.

I cannot understand how any man or woman can believe in the Lord's coming and not be a missionary, or at least committed to the work of missions with every power of his being.

Psychoanalysts believe that the only "normal" people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.

I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.

We must enhance the light, not fight the darkness.

Harriet, Hi! Light of my eye! Come to the pictures and have a good cry, For it's jolly old Saturday, Mad-as-a-hatter-day, Nothing-much-matter-day-night!

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Being around some of the bright lights of the technology world and having them expect great things helps you sit down and do it seriously.