“The difference between Schoenberg and traditional music might be demonstrated with the help of a bon mot of Schumann’s that one can tell whether a person is musical by his ability to continue performing a piece more or less correctly when someone forgets to turn a page. This, precisely, is not possible with Schoenberg.” TW Adorno, in Essays on Music.
“I’m looking for lines you don’t expect coming at you. I’m driving along in my car sometimes, listening to the radio, and I can predict what the next line and the next line of a song will be — I can tell you what the writer’s going to say before he gets there. And I’m right. And if can predict it, anybody can predict it, and that’s mediocre writing.” Harlan Howard, Nashville songwriter, quoted by Nicolas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country.