ROGER BACON

"For most of its history, rock music has been a history of producers. The sophisticated sound of this or that star was really the sound of their producer. The star, at best, was writing the melody. The rest depended on how much money their label was willing to invest in studio recording and studio musicians, and on the skills of the producer (who, by the way, also largely depended on how much money the label was willing to spend). Today's musician "is" (more and more often) the producer. His work of art is the "production" of music. The entire sophistication and complexity of the sound of a rock album used to depend largely on the producer and on the budget of the label. As music becomes the assembly of sonic events, the role of the producer becomes less and less important, and often disappears altogether (the musician records his music in his own home studio). "

PIERO SCARUFFI

Magic is a purposeful act of will focused by a particular form and directed toward a particular entity or being; and for the primitive, magic-oriented consciousness all modes of existence, all beings, are alive.

Sound is the basic means for the transmission of the magical will.

Descriptive music is not music at all. Psychological music, so called, is equally futile as music. What the future will bring us is a synthesis of all arts; but within this synthesis, each component has to stay in its own place, to use its own means of expression, and not to make a horrible mixture of the "precedes" of all combined arts. We want Order, not Chaos. The music of today is chaotic, because it does not know what it wants; or even if it knows it does not dare to do the necessary thing to get there. It is built upon anti-musical elements; it tries to destroy them, and does not know how; it feels that something is wrong, but does not know what.

But above all, it has no ideal to express, no faith — social, religious, or any other — to support it; it is metaphysically aimless. That is the worst thing that can happen to an art.

Oriental music is there, if properly understood, to tell us its secret, and to illumine our darkness. I am not advocating a going back to Oriental music. That would be the greatest nonsense. We go forward, not backward. But, as in Logic antithesis succeeds thesis, and synthesis succeeds antithesis, I firmly believe that Oriental music was the thesis, Occidental music the antithesis, and that the future must give life to a synthesis in the direction here sketched.

DANE RUDHYAR

The orchestra is an instrument of decadence. It is all on the surface; it is, like the modern palaces all gold, all light, all glitter; but in such a profusion of ornaments no soul can dwell. Our orchestral music is absolutely un-spiritual, in the real sense of the word spiritual. It has no simplicity, no spontaneity, no purity. It is either the result of a poverty of spirit trying to conceal its heavy layers of tinsel, or the frantic attempt of an imprisoned soul to break the inertia of notes and create music based almost exclusively upon half-revealed partials. What Music needs is, above all, a kind of electric instrument, conceived in a way similar to the basic idea of the "Telharmonium" of Dr. Cahill experimented with some 15 years ago. Such an instrument will permit us to produce by combination any sound, whatsoever ...

DANE RUDHYAR, 1923

But the point is that at present our main task is to be pro-creators and educators — or else helpless babes running wild into the jungle of cultural forces, at the mercy of any collective emotional current, nationalistic, religious or what not. In other words if we want really to build a musical culture on real Foundations we must know the Laws of building, the Laws of the materials we, use, the Laws of Harmony, not in a textbook sense, but in a cosmic sense as it is revealed to us by Nature philosophically understood. We must STUDY, not European theories about music, but MUSIC, in a permanent, changeless, universal sense.

DANE RUDHYAR, 1927