“Who hears music feels his solitude
Peopled at once.”
Balaustion's Adventure, line 323 (1871).
Source: The complete poetical works of Browning
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Robert Browning 179
English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era 1812–1889Related quotes

Introducing the song "New Feudalism" with The No WTO Combo on (30 November 1999)

“He who makes songs without feeling
Spoils both his words and his music.”
Qui de sentement ne fait,
Son dit et son chant contrefait.
"Remede de Fortune", line 407; translation from Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1997) p. 5.

Pop Chronicles: Show 5 - Hail, Hail, Rock 'n' Roll: The rock revolution gets underway. (Part 1) https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19751/m1/#track/6, interview recorded 1.2.1968 http://web.archive.org/web/20110615153027/http://www.library.unt.edu/music/special-collections/john-gilliland/o-s.

“Formalism is music that people don’t understand at first hearing.”
Quoted in Boris Schwarz Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917-1970 (1972) p. 115.

“Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music.”
Misattributed
First recorded appearance: Germaine de Staël's On Germany (1813). ". . . sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane." There are several other pre-Nietzsche examples, indicating that the phrase was widespread in the nineteenth-century; it was referred to in 1927 as an "old proverb".

“A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.”
Quoted by H. Proctor-Gregg, Beecham Remembered (1976), p. 154

Title poem, section IX.
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)
Source: Requiem for a Dream

Quote of Cage, in an interview with Miroslav Sebestik, 1991; in Listen, documentary by Miroslav Sebestik. ARTE France Développement, 2003; as quoted on Wikipedia, note 54
1990s