- "Music is the space between the notes. It is something to be felt. Although it does not has a concrete and precise definition....All of us know that music is every sound that reaches our ears and our heart says that it is something fabulous.....that is music."
- Claude Debussy.[citation needed]
- "The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of
establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the
co-ordination between man [sic] and time."
- Igor Stravinsky, quoted in DeLone et. al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0130493465, Ch. 3. from Igor Stravinsky' Autobiography (1962). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., p. 54.
- "Form is supposed to cover the shape or structure of of the work; content
its substance, meaning, ideas, or expressive effects. When the
nineteenth-century music critic Eduard Hanslick declared, in an
influential phrase, that music is 'forms put into motion through
sounds,' he was suggesting that music's real content lies in its form."
- Richard Middleton (1999). Form. Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, p. 141. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0631212639.
- "'Is music the art of combining sounds according to certain rules
(which vary according to place and time) for organizing a durational
unit [une durée] by means of sonorous elements?' (Petit-Robert). Here,
music is defined according to the conditions of its production (it is an
art) and by its materials: sounds. For another writer, 'the study of
sound is a matter of physics. But choosing sounds that are pleasing to
the ear is a matter of musical aesthetics' (Bourgeois 1946: 1).
Definition according to conditions of production has ceded to definition
according to effect produced in the "receiver": sounds, to be music,
must be pleasant. For others, music is almost always identified with
acoustics, a particular branch of physics: 'certainly the study of
acoustics and the properties of sound in some sense goes beyond the
domain of the properly musical, but these 'divergences' are much less
important and numerous than is generally thought' (Matras 1948: 5).
- Molino, J. (1975: 37). "Fait musical et sémiologue de la musique", Musique en Jeu, no. 17:37-62.
- "Music is a play of tones, that is, of fixed, clearly defined
quantities. Other sounds, glissandos, cries, noises, may occur as
inserts; if they are numerous the result is partly musical; if they
predominate, it is no longer music in the proper sense of the
word...discussion about the nature of the new art of sounds, those part
musical and those totally untonal, is beclouded by the fact that it is
called concrete or electronic 'music' although it has in fact
transgressed the boundaries of musical art."
- Wiora, W. (1963: 191-192). Les quartre Ages de la musique. Paris: Payot. English trans. M.D. Hector Norton. New York:Norton.
- "We are too rarely interested in specifying what defines the concept
'music' in the spirti of indigenous poeples. We would be hard put to
say (for whatever population or group we might choose) where music
begins for them, where it ends, what borders mark the transition between
speaking and singing."
- Gilbert Rouget (1968: 344). "L'ethnomusicologie", Ethnologie générale, p. 333-348. M. Poirier, ed. Paris: Gallimard.