"Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions"
About this Quote
Barzun compresses a humanist manifesto into a single line. Music exists as a shaped address to consciousness, not as a self-sufficient mechanism or a laboratory of sounds. By naming hopes, purposes, and emotions, he links musical form to the contours of living: aim and struggle, anticipation and release, joy and grief. Melodic arcs and cadences mirror the forward-leaning structure of intention; rhythm and harmony track bodily motion and inner weather. The art is made to be recognized by minds that care about outcomes.
This stance pushes back against the idea of music as pure abstraction or as a physics of vibrations. In the twentieth century Barzun saw both a cult of method in the academy and a cult of novelty in the avant-garde, often at the expense of communication. As a historian of culture and a great champion of Berlioz, he took Romantic expressiveness seriously, not as sentimentality but as knowledge about human experience that only sound can carry. To say music is intended and designed is to claim craft and purpose; it is addressed speech, not random occurrence.
Composer, performer, and listener form a chain of intention. The maker encodes possibilities of feeling and meaning; the performer animates them with timing, color, and emphasis; the listener completes the circuit by attending, remembering, and projecting. If we remove hopes and purposes from that circuit, we are left with data, not art. That is why background music and algorithmic filler feel thin: they bypass the mutual risk and reward of address between minds.
Barzun is not denying complexity or discipline; he is restoring their aim. Structure is a means to resonance with the living. Music endures because it not only reflects our inner life but helps shape it, giving form to what we seek, fear, and love. It is for someone, and that someone is a being who hopes.
This stance pushes back against the idea of music as pure abstraction or as a physics of vibrations. In the twentieth century Barzun saw both a cult of method in the academy and a cult of novelty in the avant-garde, often at the expense of communication. As a historian of culture and a great champion of Berlioz, he took Romantic expressiveness seriously, not as sentimentality but as knowledge about human experience that only sound can carry. To say music is intended and designed is to claim craft and purpose; it is addressed speech, not random occurrence.
Composer, performer, and listener form a chain of intention. The maker encodes possibilities of feeling and meaning; the performer animates them with timing, color, and emphasis; the listener completes the circuit by attending, remembering, and projecting. If we remove hopes and purposes from that circuit, we are left with data, not art. That is why background music and algorithmic filler feel thin: they bypass the mutual risk and reward of address between minds.
Barzun is not denying complexity or discipline; he is restoring their aim. Structure is a means to resonance with the living. Music endures because it not only reflects our inner life but helps shape it, giving form to what we seek, fear, and love. It is for someone, and that someone is a being who hopes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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