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About this quote

What does it mean?
Music should accurately reflect human speech tones and emotions without exaggeration.
In plain terms
Great music mimics the way humans speak and feel.
What can you take from it?
Music works best when it sounds like natural speech.

Where it applies

  • composing
  • singing
  • performance

Putting it to work

  • writing vocal music
  • imitating speech patterns
  • singing naturally

Questions to consider

  • Should music sound like speech?
  • How do you hear emotion in melody?

Another view

Some music styles value abstraction over speech-like realism.

More from Modest Mussorgsky

  1. In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.

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  2. I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera.

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  3. Sounds and ideas are hanging in the air;I am devouring them and stuffing myself.A comment he wrote after viewing an exhibition of Viktor Hartmann's drawings an…

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