Excerpt from one of Langgaard's notebooks

In Rued Langgaard's notebooks there are several noteworthy entries that characterise the composer's conception of music at that time of writing.

In this excerpt from a notebook dated 1925, Langgaard wrote as follows:

"Music is a craft. A rule-defined norm for beauty. The fact that music thereby becomes uniform is not a deficiency, any more than the Greek norm for art was a deficiency... Originality and personality are not concepts that are relevant to music... [addendum, follow the red line:] What I more or less always have sought to express is basically not modernist..." (Here, Langgaard sees 'modernism' as synonymous with artificial originality and subjectivity).