Francesco Balilla Pratella quotes

All innovators, logically speaking, have been Futurists in relation to their time. Palestrina would have thought that Bach was crazy, and Bach would have thought Beethoven the same, and Beethoven would have thought Wagner equally so.
Rossini liked to boast that he had finally understood the music of Wagner-by reading it backward; Verdi, after listening to the overture to Tannhäuser, wrote to a friend that Wagner was mad.
So we stand at the window of a glorious mental hospital, even while we unhesitatingly declare that counterpoint and the fugue, which even today are still considered the most important branches of musical instruction... (Francesco Balilla Pratella)

I address myself to the young. They alone will have to listen to me, they alone will be able to understand me. Some people are born already old, drooling specters from the past, cryptograms tumid with poisons: to them, no words or ideas except a single injunction: the end.

Francesco Balilla Pratella

Knowledge of instrumentation should be acquired through experience. Instrumental composition should be conceived instrumentally, imagining and hearing a particular orchestra for each particular and diverse musical condition of the mind.

Francesco Balilla Pratella