Benjamin Boretz

Benjamin Boretz , composer and music theorist

• "The very being of music is created by cognitive attributions made by individual perceiving or conceiving imaginers, in individual acts of perceiving or conceiving--that, in fact, the only real music 'theory' IS the creative-intellectual transaction which ontologizes music itself."
  • from Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.

• "Even discourse which does not acknowledge "musical coherence" as "intellectual communication" does not in fact succeed in treating it as anything else; it is only by locating their concerns in domains where the "musical" aspects of music are peripherally or not at all involved that musical discourses can circumvent the fact that when the "object of thought" consists of the contents of a musical composition just the recognition of the identities of any of these contents (or even of the undivided single identity of them taken all together as a "unit") involves (to varying degrees) the same considerations that are involved in a discourse that explicitly--and hence with a better chance of cognitive particularity--regards such a composition as an instance of communicative thought."
  • from Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.

• "Even the most, 'emotive' view of music has to 'be' emotive 'about something distinct', which necessarily involves having a 'theory' about it, for better or worse, in awareness or unawareness, and that a 'musical' something distinct can be cognitively understood as an "emotional experience" only insofar as it is first cognitively understood as a human-communicative manifestation, as an "instance of thought".
  • from Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.