Love Quote by Lukas Foss

Foss is drawing a hard line against the polite eclecticism that haunts a lot of “versatile” composition: the idea that you can borrow any style, any idiom, any sonic fashion, and simply arrange it into legitimacy. His claim is almost stubbornly psychological. If you don’t love the material, you won’t metabolize it. You’ll decorate it. The result might be competent, even impressive, but it won’t feel authored.

The intent is less romantic than it sounds. Foss isn’t arguing for some mystical purity; he’s arguing for commitment as a technical requirement. Loving a musical language means you’ve listened long enough to internalize its grammar, its jokes, its taboos, its pressure points. That intimacy is what allows a composer to bend the rules without sounding like they’re copying homework. Without that emotional buy-in, influence stays external: quotation instead of transformation, pastiche instead of voice.

The subtext is also a warning about status-chasing. Using music you don’t love often means using music you think you’re supposed to love: the canonical moves, the “serious” references, the trendy gestures. Foss, who moved fluently among neoclassicism, serial techniques, and a more pluralist late-20th-century sensibility, knew the difference between curiosity and cosplay. “Making it one’s own” isn’t a branding exercise; it’s the byproduct of deep attention. Love, in his framing, isn’t sentiment. It’s the only reliable proof that you’ve stayed with the sound long enough to earn the right to change it.