Gary F. Marcus Quotes

Repetition sometimes works in poetry, but rarely in prose. The musical provocateur John Cage once wrote a lecture in which a single page was repeated fourteen times, with the refrain If anybody is sleep let him go to sleep (Cage, 1961). Midway through, the artist Jean Reynal stood up and screamed, John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute.

~ Gary F. Marcus

Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).

~ Gary F. Marcus

But nobody is born being able to hear [intervals], and many people never master them. Some people never even notice that Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and The Alphabet Song follow the same melody (and hence consist of the same sequence of intervals).

~ Gary F. Marcus