Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (born November 28, 1908) is a French anthropologist

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• "Any attempt to codify musical reality into a kind of imitation grammar (I refer mainly to the efforts associated with the Twelve-Tone System) is a brand of fetishism which shares with Fascism and racism the tendency to reduce live processes to immobile, labeled objects, the tendency to deal with formalities rather than substance. Claude Lévi-Strauss describes (though to illustrate a different point) a captain at sea, his ship reduced to a frail raft without sails, who, by enforcing a meticulous protocol on his crew, is able to distract them from nostalgia for a safe harbor and from the desire for a destination."
  • Luciano Berio, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• "It [serialism] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination....[sic]"
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1975). The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: I (Le Cru et le Cuit), p.113-114. New York: Harper Colophon. Translated by Doreen and John Weightman.