Benjamin Boretz

Benjamin Aaron Boretz (born 3 October 1934) is an American composer and music theorist.

Benjamin Boretz at the house of J.K. Randall, Princeton, N.J., circa 1981.

Quotes

• Do I have to tell you about the spiritual cannibalism of the culture, our culture, which has been bombarding us with ultrasensory overstimulation aiming to reprocess us into fulltime consumption machines, stealing above all from us our time (not an inch of time without an imprint of message), and even our very sense of time (to be measured in lengths of no more than one message unit each) under the guise of entertainment, and even of 'art,' commoditizing the eternal, hyping the primal? Our time is the sine qua non of our identity. We need to take extreme measures to reclaim it for ourselves and each other.
  • Open Space 1 audio CD, 1988 March.

• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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".
  • Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.