Quotations

Use quotations sparingly. Weaving a short phrase into your text, especially if it is characteristic or powerful, is the best way to quote. Quotations are useful for the purposes of illustration, but generally do not constitute proof.

Avoid long slabs of quotation.

Never assume that the quotation makes its point by itself without your analysis (the same can be said, even more strongly, of musical examples). Resist the temptation to quote frequently or at length: an essay which consists of long quotations linked by short passages of connecting prose wearies the reader and defeats its main purpose, which is to convey the writer's own thoughts on the subject.

Short quotations should be enclosed within inverted commas, and quotations longer than approximately four lines should be indented.

For example:

When I undertook to write the music to Alceste, I resolved to divest it entirely of all those abuses, introduced into it either by the mistaken vanity of singers of by the too great complaisance of composers, which have so long disfigured Italian opera and made of the most splendid and most beautiful of spectacles the most ridiculous and wearisome.¹

¹ C.W. Gluck, Dedication to Alceste, quoted in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History: The Classic Era (New York: Norton, 1965) 99.

Surround any words interpolated or modified in a quotation with square brackets [ ], not round ().

e.g. In writing Alceste, Gluck 'believed that [his] greatest labor should be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity'.

The original, in the first person, read 'I believed that my greatest labor...'

This could be more elegantly rephrased, however, as:

In Alceste, Gluck strove for a 'beautiful simplicity.'

If you omit any words from a quotation, indicate the omission by the insertion of an ellipsis (three dots). Do not, however, use ellipses at the beginning and end of quotes.

For example:

When I undertook to write the music to Alceste, I resolved to divest it entirely of all those abuses...which have so long disfigured Italian opera and made of the most splendid and most beautiful of spectacles the most ridiculous and wearisome.