Polyphonic Quotes & Sayings

He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes - perfect for small and secret spaces. — Nicole Mones

For the last fifty years or so, The Novel's demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can't in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language - especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end? — Lance Olsen

62. It is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifixes designed that the Divine Redeemer's Body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See. — Pope Pius XII

Recordings of Georgian folk polyphonic songs makes a great musical impression. They are recorded in a tradition of active reproduction of Georgian folk music the origin of which begins from ancient time. It is a wonderful finding and can give to the performance much more than all the modem music can ... Yodel or "Krimanchuli" as it is called in Georgia is the best song which I have ever heard. ["America" magazine, No 23 1967] — Igor Stravinsky

In actual fact, the utterly incompatible elements comprising Dostoevsky's material are distributed among several worlds and several autonomous consciousnesses; they are presented not within a single field of vision but within several fields of vision, each full and of equal worth; and it is not the material directly but these worlds, their consciousnesses with their individual fields of vision that combine in a higher unity, a unity, so to speak, of the second order, the unity of a polyphonic novel. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Tomorrow. Right now, I only want you. — Stephanie Perkins

The love of nature is the love for the Creator. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The life of matter can be embraced only by an orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, by means of the most extensive analogies. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

there was a reason for everything that happened and that all of those reasons were like threads that, over time, wove together into the pattern of a person's life. Every thread was necessary for the final pattern to be complete. — Erin Nicholas

the trees were putting on their September garments, brown and red and yellow, — Jeff VanderMeer

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free. — Victor Hugo

At Carnegie Hall the Preservation Hall Jazz Band showed how easily it could hop from era to era. It could work like a rhythm-and-blues horn section or a tightly arranged little big band if need be, but it could also switch back into the polyphonic glories of vintage New Orleans jazz, in which nearly every instrument seems to improvise around the tune at the same time. — Jon Pareles

I started playing guitar when I was 12 and probably from that age knew that I wanted to make music and make my own music. Playing with other bands like the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens was more like an apprenticeship for me than anything. — St. Vincent

Each novel presents an opposition, which is never canceled out dialectically, of many consciousnesses, and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit, just as souls and spirits do not merge in the formally polyphonic world of Dante. — Mikhail Bakhtin

From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence
in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug ... I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
- from Harper's Notebook, November 2010 — Lewis H. Lapham

Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance. — Amy Lowell

It is strange how the presence of additional people can make you feel more alone. — James Alan Gardner

Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that there, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly. — Paul Klee

Christians are a polyphonic people. — Jeremy Begbie

An economist is a man that can tell you ... what can happen under any given condition, and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's too. — Will Rogers

The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice. — Andres Segovia

I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness, she said. — Gregory Maguire

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight. — Joan D. Vinge

A newly born genre never supplants or replaces any already existing genres. Each new genre merely supplements the old ones, merely widens the circle of already existing genres. For every genre has its own predominant sphere of existence, in which it is irreplaceable. Thus the appearance of the polyphonic novel does not nullify or in any way restrict the further productive development of monologic forms of the novel (biographical, historical, the novel of everyday life, the novel-epic, etc.), for there will always continue to exist and expand those spheres of existence, of man and nature, which require precisely objectified and finalizing, that is monological, forms of artistic cognition. But again we repeat: the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere in which this consciousness exists, in all its depth and specificity, cannot be reached through a monologic artistic approach. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Whatever comes under the heading of fugal form partakes in some way of the nature of a fugue. You already know, I feel sure, that in texture all fugues are polyphonic or contrapuntal (the terms are identical in meaning). Therefore, it follows that all fugal forms are polyphonic or contrapuntal in texture. — Aaron Copland

The [guitar is the] instrument most complete and richest in its harmonic and polyphonic possibilities. — Manuel De Falla

I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy. — Peter Greenaway

Yes," he thought; "he is a doctor, he must know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge is more than he can bear. — Robert Louis Stevenson