Science & Tech Quote by Lukas Foss

The line opens with a disarming feint: Foss “doesn’t dare” talk science, a modesty that’s partly sincere and partly tactical. In the postwar decades when composers were getting cozy with systems - serialism, chance procedures, computer music, the lab-coat aura of “research” - arguing about art could turn into a credentials game. Foss sidesteps it. He refuses the prestige economy of scientific-sounding certainty, then immediately plants his flag where authority actually lives for a composer: the lived experience of making work.

What makes the sentence bite is its balancing act. “Emotion and intellect” reads like a truce between warring camps, but Foss isn’t proposing a polite compromise; he’s setting a minimum requirement. The subtext is a critique of extremes: music that’s only brain can calcify into elegant puzzles, and music that’s only feeling can dissolve into unshaped gush. “In order for art to happen” is doing quiet rhetorical work too. Art isn’t treated as a static product you manufacture; it’s an event, something that occurs when two energies collide - structure and impulse, craft and risk.

The context matters: Foss moved among modernists who prized rigor, yet he also embraced play and theatricality. His quote reads like a composer’s manifesto against the false binary that still haunts cultural debate: the idea that you either calculate or you confess. Foss insists the real discipline is holding both at once, letting intellect give emotion form, and letting emotion keep intellect honest.