"Modern musical technique is for use. ...

... The revolutionary composer inherits it, it is his jumping-off place. He should no more scrap it than a socialist society should scrap a machine because its functioning in a bourgeois system meant abuse or persecution or unemployment. ... I am as aware as anybody that the new music of the masses is not going to be the music of Schönberg or Stravinsky or Hindemith. But they were preparing the way. ... That they were unconsciously preparing the way, beginning something whose counterparts and possibilities they did not dream of, was none of their business. It is distinctly ours, who appraise them in order to use them; who digest in order to eliminate, but also to absorb."

- Marc Blitzstein, 1936