Robert Fripp: Quotes about music

Robert Fripp is English guitarist, composer and record producer. Explore interesting quotes on music.

Robert Fripp: 34 quotes6 likes

“Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence. Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken.”

“The Vinyl Solution.” in Musician, Player, and Listener 24 (April-May 1980): 34.
Elsewhere

“Music so wishes to be heard that sometimes it calls on unlikely characters to give it voice, and ears. This wishing-to-be heard calls into existence the Performance Event; where music, musician and audience may come together as one, in communion. This communion has six different forms of being and experiencing itself (plus an invisible seventh); and these forms, or principles, are simultaneously present within the Performance.
I - When people get together with music, something happens.
II - In a performance, things come together, mysteriously; and go better than we might anticipate; and better than we deserve.
III - A performance can take on a life and character of its own.
IV - Any one performance is a multiplicity of performances.
V - The possible is possible.
VI - The impossible is possible.
The Seventh Principle resides within Silence.
Trust the event.”

The Six Principles of the Performance Event

“With a note of music, one strikes the fundamental, and, in addition to the root note, other notes are generated: these are called the harmonic series…As one fundamental note contains within it other notes in the octave, two fundamentals produce a remarkable array of harmonics, and the number of possible combinations between all the notes increases phenomenally. With a triad, affairs stand a good chance of getting severely out of hand…”

[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, 114, 0-679-74275-1]
Elsewhere

“The musician is as rich as the music they give away.”

Guitar Craft Monograph III: Aphorisms, Oct. 27 1988