Looking for a quote

May 19, 2005 9:56 AM

I swear that I've seen this quote before: "A good {conductor,composer} will anticipate his audience... and then do something else." That may not be the exact phrasing, and my googlefu has failed me. Does anyone recognize this?
posted by sbutler to grab bag (2 comments total)

It sounds a bit like an oblique strategy. Well, it sounds like several of them.
posted by sagwalla at 10:54 AM on May 19, 2005

No one else seems to be stepping up here...

I found this, from Levi-Strauss:

"The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own."

here
posted by sagwalla at 10:43 AM on May 20, 2005