Kate Molleson > Quotes

“The distinction between "classical" and "folk" music only really emerged in the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. The words only make sense (to the extent they do) when they're set in opposition to each other. The musicologist Matthew Gelbart has written a terrific book on the subject called The Invention of Folk Music and Art Music, in which he details how it used to be that musicians just played music: what mattered was the place and purpose, not so much who wrote the tune or played it or how they spoke. The same musicians would cover courts, pop songs and worship. These musicians travelled and shape-shifted. If dancing was required, they would play dance standards. If the mood was contemplative, they would unravel something slow and soulful.”
― Kate Molleson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland

“[Walter] Smetak wanted his plásticas sonoras to summon a new harmony between shape, space, spirit and humanity. He dreamed of travelling beyond notions of consonance and dissonance, beyond sight and hearing and past and present to arrive at a state he called caossonance, where light becomes sound and a grand union of the senses is achieved.”
― Kate Molleson, Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century

“Love must be a soft thing, [Walter] Smetak wrote in one of his many aphorisms. Love must arrive without causing a disturbance. 'If it is the other way around, it is just a passion, full of trouble.”
― Kate Molleson, Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century

“[José] Maceda thought a lot about opposites, and how they seemed to him to be a Western obsession. In an essay called A Concept of Time in a Music of Southeast Asia, he references Jacques Derrida on the subject:
Good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence, truth vs. error, identity vs. difference, mind vs. matter, man vs. woman. soul vs. body, life vs. death, nature vs. culture...”
― Kate Molleson, Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century

“Meaning,"  she [Éliane Radigue] insists, "always comes from the life of the sound itself." Instead, she describes music and spirituality as train tracks, never meeting but connected by the vehicle (presumably us) which is travelling upon them.”
― Kate Molleson, Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century

“Her persuit [Annea Lockwood] was the opposite: she wanted to see where close listening and attention to process might get her. Above all, she searched for sounds that were rich and complex enough to trigger a wake-up call. Her hunch was that if we allow ourselves to listen properly, if we start to really feel a sound in our bodies, we might also start to take more notice of the thing that made it. If that thing is a river, or a cat, or a neighbourhood, or a fellow human being, we might start to care about the source in new and deeper ways.”
― Kate Molleson, Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century

“And when we do listen, stop exotifying the differences.”
― Kate Molleson, Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century

“In her [Éliane Radigue] essay Le temps n'a pas d'importance, she likens her music to a plant. "We never see a plant move, but it is growing continually." I ask her about that thing she does with time - her temporal sorcery, how time in her music feels both contracted (in the way it focuses on tiny details) and elongated (in the way it unfolds over many hours). "By nature," she says, "slowness is expansive yet it allows us to hear up close.”
― Kate Molleson, Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century