"Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics"
About this Quote
Quine’s line lands like a sneer at the idea that “serious” music requires paperwork. “Inherently hateful” isn’t just crankiness; it’s a declaration of allegiance to feel, friction, and risk over credentialed correctness. By equating notation with mathematics, he’s not insulting math so much as naming what it can do to a living thing: turn sound into a set of solvable problems, where the goal is to arrive at the right answer rather than the right moment.
The subtext is a power struggle. Reading music is a gatekeeping tool in a lot of scenes: conservatories, studio work, orchestras. Quine came out of rock and the downtown/New York ecosystem where originality and attitude mattered, and where musicians often built a language by ear, by repetition, by accident. In that world, notation can feel like an invasive bureaucracy, a way of importing hierarchies from “legit” culture into spaces that survive on immediacy. His disgust carries a class critique, too: who gets taught to read, who gets praised for it, who gets written off without it.
The sentence also reveals an aesthetic: Quine’s playing (famously sharp, restless, unsentimental) thrives on micro-decisions and expressive timing that don’t map neatly onto a staff. “Mathematics” here is shorthand for a chilled, standardized music-making where the page becomes more real than the room. He’s defending a musician’s intelligence that isn’t legible on paper: instinct, memory, listening, nerve.
The subtext is a power struggle. Reading music is a gatekeeping tool in a lot of scenes: conservatories, studio work, orchestras. Quine came out of rock and the downtown/New York ecosystem where originality and attitude mattered, and where musicians often built a language by ear, by repetition, by accident. In that world, notation can feel like an invasive bureaucracy, a way of importing hierarchies from “legit” culture into spaces that survive on immediacy. His disgust carries a class critique, too: who gets taught to read, who gets praised for it, who gets written off without it.
The sentence also reveals an aesthetic: Quine’s playing (famously sharp, restless, unsentimental) thrives on micro-decisions and expressive timing that don’t map neatly onto a staff. “Mathematics” here is shorthand for a chilled, standardized music-making where the page becomes more real than the room. He’s defending a musician’s intelligence that isn’t legible on paper: instinct, memory, listening, nerve.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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