Quotes about music
page 21

“McDonald's is a place to rock / It is a restaurant where they buy food to eat / It is a good place to listen to the music / People flock here to get down to the rock music.”

Wesley Willis (1963–2003) American singer-songwriter

Rock 'N Roll McDonald's
Lyrics, Solo

People, Food

“When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The Weight of Glory (1949)

God, Pain, Secret, World

“[Music] is inarticulate poesy.”

John Dryden Tyrannick Love

Tyrannick Love (1669), Preface

“The death of Black Jade coincided with the wedding hour of Pao-yu and Precious Virtue. Shortly after Snow Duck was taken to the wedding chambers, Black Jade had regained consciousness. During this lucid moment, which was not unlike the afterglow of the setting sun, she took Purple Cuckoo's hand and said to her with an effort, "My hour is here. You have served me for many years, and I had hoped that we should be together the rest of our lives… but I am afraid…"
The effort exhausted her and she fell back, panting. She still held Purple Cuckoo's hand and continued after a while, "Mei-mei, I have only one wish. I have no attachment here. After my death, tell them to send my body back to the south––"
She stopped again, and her eyes closed slowly. Purple Cuckoo felt her mistress' hand tighten over hers. Knowing this was a sign of the approaching end, she sent for Li Huan, who had gone back to her own apartment for a brief rest. When the latter returned with Quest Spring, Black Jade's hands were already cold and her eyes dull. They suppressed their sobs and hastened to dress her. Suddenly Black Jade cried, "Pao-yu, Pao-yu, how––" Those were her last words.
Above their own lamentations, Li Huan, Purple Cuckoo, and Quest Spring thought they heard the soft notes of an ethereal music in the sky. They went out to see what it was, but all they could hear was the rustling of the wind through the bamboos and all they could see was the shadow of the moon creeping down the western wall.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 307

Death, Hope, Spring, Effort

“We were tired of writing music that sounded like everybody else, and we were stuck in this rut for so long of just trying to emulate our favorite bands. We're just going to write stuff that feels good, sounds good. And if other people don't like it, oh well. Then we remembered Bert from just playing shows with his band. So we gave him a call and he happened to not be in any bands. The timing was like perfect.”

Bert McCracken (1982) American musician

Branden Steineckert, former drummer for The Used, on recruiting McCracken to the band, reported in Alan Sculley (July 4, 2003) "Getting used to reality", The Columbian, p. F9.
About

People, Feeling, Time, Perfection

“Silence is the speech of love,
The music of the spheres above.”

Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903) American poet

Speech of Love.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love, Silence

“So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of the fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“I have never been able to understand women composers who do not wish to be called women composers. I understand their argument but it seems so superficial to me. Our strength lies in our identification with women and music.”

Beth Anderson (1950) American neo-romantic composer

What Makes Music Woman Oriented (1996)

Women, Understanding

“[I] grew up in this city [Miami], and my music is a blend of two cultures. In the beginning it was heavily Cuban. At this point it's [from] all over...”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (February 4, 2007)
2007, 2008

“I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only “one undisturbed song of pure concent” to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

Thinking

“Music would probably go. A lot of art would. That’s what I’m saying – I’m really into comics and movies and video games, and I don’t want to give that stuff up. At the same time, I think it’s filling the void for the stuff we’re missing.”

Andrew Hurley (1980) American musician

On if rock bands would ruin civilization
The Boys With the Car-Crash Hearts (March 8, 2007)

Art, Game, Thinking, Time

“I see a face of love,
Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong:
Yea — art thou come again to me, great Song?"
The face bent over him like silver night
In long-remembered summers; that calm light
Of days which shine in firmaments of thought,
That past unchangeable, from change still wrought.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

Love, Art, Light, Strong

“I was invited to come here to speak about my idea of art, which is to enlarge the effectivity of art beyond the idea of art as coming out of art history — an art idea which contains the well-known disciplines like sculpture, architecture, painting, music, dancing, poetry and so on. I would like to declare why I feel that it's now necessary to establish a new kind of art, able to show the problems of the whole society, of every living being — and how this new discipline — which I call social sculpture — can realize the future of humankind. It could be a guarantee for the evolution of the earth as a planet, establish conditions for other planetarians too, and you can control it with your own thinking.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1970's, Joseph Beuys... Public Dialogue' 1974, p. 5; Lead paragraph of article

Art, Feeling, History, Idea

“What is this creature, Music, save the Art,
The Rhythm that the planets journey by?
The living Sun-Ray entering the heart,
Touching the Life with that which cannot die?”

John Masefield (1878–1967) English poet and writer

" Where does the uttered Music go? http://www.williamwalton.net/works/choral/where_does_the_uttered_music_go.html" (1946)

Life, Art, Sun, Heart

“If I tend to reread the European past in my own Postmodern image, if I frequently write about Bach and Beethoven in the same ways in which I discuss the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and John Zorn, it is not to denigrate the canon but rather to show the power of music all throughout its history as a signifying practice. For this is how culture always works—always grounded in codes and social contracts, always open to fusions, extensions, transformations. To me, music never seems so trivial as in its 'purely musical' readings. If there was at one time a rationale for adopting such an intellectual position, that time has long since past. And if the belief in the nineteenth-century notion of aesthetic autonomy continues to be an issue when we study cultural history, it can no longer be privileged as somehow true.”

Susan McClary (1946) American musicologist

McClary, Susan (2000), Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, p. 186–169. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520232089

Way, History, Study, Time

“The chimney-sweepers of London have also singled out the first of May for their festival; at which time they parade the streets in companies, disguised in various manners. Their dresses are usually decorated with gilt paper, and other mock fineries; they have their shovels and brushes in their hands, which they rattle one upon the other; and to this rough music they jump about in imitation of dancing.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 358
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Chimney sweeps

Time, Dance

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 21

People, Sense, Effort, Waiting

“Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

As quoted in Greatness : Who Makes History and Why by Dean Keith Simonton, p. 110

Light

“The aim of art is to get us to dream, just like music, for it expresses a mood projected onto the canvas, which arouses identical sensations in the viewer.”

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) French painter and writer

two short quotes of Picabia, in 'A Paris painter', by Hapgood, published in 'The Globe and Commercial Advertiser', 20 Febr. 1913, p. 8
1910's

Dreams, Art, Mood

“Music… immerses us in seemingly stable worlds! How can this be, when there is so little of it present at each moment?”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

World

“The people of Sybaris, a city in Calabria, are proverbial on account of their effeminancy; and it is said that they taught their horses to dance to the music of the pipe; for which reason, their enemies the Crotonians, at a time when they were at war with them, brought a great number of pipers into the field, and at the commencement of the battle, they played upon their pipes; the Sybarian horses, hearing the sound of the music, began to dance; and their riders, unable to manage them as they ought to have done, were thrown into confusion, and defeated with prodigious slaughter. This circumstance is mentioned by Aristotle; and, if not strictly true, proves, at least that the teaching of animals to exceed the bounds of action prescribed by nature was not unknown to the ancients.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 242
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Sybaris

War, People, Nature, Time

“"Rock" [music]… is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2000, The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000)

People, Light, Universe, Passion

“The game of Bees in the Trees is a variant of musical chairs and is best played with funeral music and in the open air. The object of the game is to sit down on a vacant chair when the music stops. If the chair sat in is occupied by bees, it is permissible to arrange a professional foul.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Drowning By Numbers

Game, Tree, Bee

“I saw The Sound of Music again recently, and I loved it. Probably it's a more valuable film now than when it first came out, because some of the things it stood for have already disappeared. There's a kind of naive loveliness about it, and love goes by so fast … love and music and happiness and family, that's what it's all about. I believe in these things. It would be awful not to, wouldn't it?”

Julie Andrews (1935) British actress, singer, author, theatre director, and dancer

Photoplay (September 1973)

Love, Happiness, Family

“I believe natural beauty stimulates the creative mind and it’s no wonder the residents have always had an affinity to the arts. Growing up I was surrounded by music, dance, theater, literature and given my father owned and operated the only two cinema halls in town, I was a very popular kid on Saturdays when traditionally the two would flock to see the latest “flick” that was playing at either the Capitol Cinema or The Rink”

Erick Avari (1952) Indian actor

formerly a roller skating rink

Beauty, Art, Literature, Nature

“I think it really is all about technique, but it's where the intersection of acting and singing sort of meets. There has to be a musicality to the delivery of a line of dialogue that gives it impact. Somebody like Nathan Lane understands that. It's in his bones really. He can deliver a line five different ways, and each one has incredible impact and intonation and rhythm.”

Nathan Lane (1956) American actor

Rob Minkoff, on Lane's ability with voice acting — reported in Evan Henerson (July 19, 2002) No Vocal Yokels - When Animated Characters Need That Extra Dimension, Stars Step Up To The Mic", Daily News of Los Angeles, p. U6.
About

Way, Understanding, Thinking, Singing

“The reason why the music is important is that it's an art form— an ancient art form— that takes in the mythology of our people.”

Wynton Marsalis (1961) American jazz musician

Attributed

People, Art

“Their heavenly harps a lower strain began, and in soft music mourn the fall of man.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

“I discovered that the computer is not like the violin; it doesn't take inborn genius or a lifetime of practice to get sweet music out of it.”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Preface, p. x
Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

“I didn't expect to get the opportunity to create music for a living. I just couldnt stop making music, it was too much fun.”

Jesper Kyd (1972) musician

Amiga Music Preservation interview, 2006

“Somehow, suddenly, a musical idea occurs to you; either a whole phrase, or three notes, or a series of chords, something that seems pregnant with possibilities for development. Once you have the kinds of ideas that fascinate you, you're no longer in a position to decide the nature of the animal. It's going to take its essence from the musical ideas that occur to you…. Some musical ideas are too short, they don't seem long enough to carry you through ten minutes of music, so you have to start searching about for other ideas; contrasting ones that seem to fit with the original ones.”

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor

Aaron Copland: the Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, ISBN 0805049096.

Search, Idea, Nature, Animals

“I wanted to take up music, so my father bought me a blunt instrument. He told me to knock myself out.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

“They were brought out of Africa and into chains in America. Or they were born into slavery here. Yes, I am talking about the first African-Americans to reach these shores, but I am also describing the animals now enslaved in circuses. The species and continents are different, but the stories are tragically similar. The animals in circuses are held against their will by chains and domination. They are forced to perform a series of acts by coercion and violence because they would never normally do these things on their own. They can never choose their own partners, their own homes, their own food or have control over any aspect of their lives. I don't care how this is dressed up by promoters with music and lights, it is still slavery.”

Richard Pryor (1940–2005) American stand-up comedian, actor, social critic, writer, and MC

Wrote in November 2005, criticizing a black-owned circus; as quoted in "Pryor Fought Animal Abuse" by Lisa Lange, in Albuquerque Journal (15 December 2005) https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/206590625/

Food, Home, Light, Animals

“Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary

Men, Painting

“When I was a small child, The New York Times received every new creation of Igor Stravinsky with hostility, but even then I knew, like everybody else, that he was the greatest living composer-and I knew it even without having heard much Stravinsky or even any of the more recent works at all. It is a mistake of music historians to rely too much on journalists and music critics to assess a composer's reputation, as we generally find a certain delay in their transmission of the more influential professional judgments.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 2 : How to Become Immortal

Hostility, Time

“Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears:
Yet, slower, yet; O faintly, gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
Woe weeps out her division, when she sings.
Droop herbs, and flowers,
Fall grief in showers,
Our beauties are not ours;
O, I could still,
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature's pride is now, a withered daffodil.”

Ben Jonson Cynthia's Revels

Cynthia's Revels (1600), Act I, scene i

Beauty, Spring, Flowers, Nature

“Without the music to shout over, few people bothered saying anything." (Remarking on a power cut while in a bar in the Dominican Republic)”

Mark Kurlansky (1948) American journalist

A Continent of Islands" (1992).

People

“He [Gilels] played in an easy, natural manner, with strong but unassuming musicianship. His technique was brilliant; years later Neuhaus, still astonished, was to recall Gilels's incredible octaves in Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody. Yet Gilels was never looked upon as a mere virtuoso. As a matter of fact, his programs did not often include music pour epater le bourgeois. He played a stedy diet of Beethoven (the Hammerklavier was a work that strongly engaged his last years), Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms. In many respects, the great virtuoso who put his authoritative stamp on whatever he played was, at the same time, a thinking man's pianist.”

Emil Gilels (1916–1985) Soviet pianist

Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Pianists

Nature, Thinking, Strong, Time

“Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.”

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist

"The Power of Music" (1964), translated in Music Journal, September 1965, p. 37.

People

“Regardless of how I live my life, there are people who develop fixations that are not healthy. It could be a visual thing, or it could be the music that they are drawn to. These people need help.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

The Telegraph interview (2005)

Life, People, Help

“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

As quoted in The Unlawful Concert : An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Case (1970) by Fred Gardner.
Unsourced French: Il suffit d'ajouter "militaire" à un mot pour lui faire perdre sa signification. Ainsi la justice militaire n'est pas la justice, la musique militaire n'est pas la musique.
It suffices to add "military" to a word for it to lose its meaning. Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Justice

“I was walking down the street with my friend and he said "I hear music", as if there is any other way you can take it in. You're not special, that's how I receive it too. I tried to taste it but it did not work.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Strategic Grill Locations

Way

“The musical equivalent of the towers of St Pancras Station”

Thomas Beecham (1879–1961) British conductor and impresario

Of Edward Elgar's 1st symphony
Neville Cardus: Sir Thomas Beecham, A Memoir, (1961)

“The child has talent, loves music, and needs help. I can't give her money, but I can teach her; so I do, and she is the most promising pupil I have. Help one another, is part of the religion of our sisterhood, Fan.”

Louisa May Alcott book An Old-Fashioned Girl

An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Ch. 13 : The Sunny Side; this has often been quoted as "Helping one another, is part of the religion of our sisterhood."

Love, Money, Religion, Help

“The music our collisions make!”

Aaron Weiss

In a Market Dimly Lit.
Brother, Sister (2006)

““I confess a fascination and love for clocks.”
“Why?” asked Sagitta.
“There is something so reassuring about a device which echoes the movements of stars and sun and planets.”
“To seek to understand the spheres is to dull their music,” said the girl softly.
“I don’t agree. The better one understands, the more one can appreciate,” replied William.”

Melinda M. Snodgrass (1951) American writer

Source: Queen's Gambit Declined (1989), Chapter 8 (p. 88)

Love, Girl, Star, Understanding

“If someone only ever listens to, say, Nickelback, their opinion [about music taste] is valid but largely meaningless since they don't bring any depth to the discussion :)”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

“We have faith in the people who support us. If they really like us, they're going to want to be cool enough to buy our music, and realize that if they don't, the record label gets our first-born child.”

Ben Moody (1981) American musician

People

People, Faith, Support

“Every weekend families across Britain settle down to watch the X-factor or Britain’s Got Talent. We revel in the discovery of new talent, the chance for someone to come from nowhere and suddenly make it big based simply on their raw ability and hard work. Yet (perhaps outside the realm of music and entertainment) our society is all too often the opposite of this ideal of opportunity.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

Jo Cox: Opportunity must knock in a fairer society http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/jo-cox-opportunity-must-knock-in-a-fairer-society-1-6857022 (24 September 2014)

Family, Chance

“I've had a lot of different experiences in music over the years. And not everything you do can satisfy everybody's idealised version of you.”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

dig interview (2004)

“What's wrong with musicals now is all the gifted men who've died of AIDS—who would otherwise be here today creating great theater.”

Madeline Kahn (1942–1999) American actress

Reported in Boze Hadleigh, (2007) Broadway Babylon: Glamour, Glitz, and Gossip on the Great White Way, Back Stage Books, ISBN 0823088308, p. 95.
Attributed

Men

“On the whole, I'm a positive, skippity-la-la person but I love the dark side of music and I will always want to explore that. It's a positive-sounding album but there's stuff underneath for sure.”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

On Eye to the Telescope.
KTTunstall.com

Love, Personality

“Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered throughout the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart's ticking (metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers….”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part I

Love, Death, World, Light

“Hears the music under the rock
One of these days he'll stop
Don't stop when the music stops.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Such a Quiet Man (original song!)" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HA6bri22Tk, the first original song she posted to YouTube, about which she wrote: "I got bored so I wrote this song tonight. The music, instruments, the lyrics, backup vocals, everything was me. And yes it is TOTALLY WEIRD!!!!!!" (13 May 2007)

“The flaw of target marketing is that it assumes people are indifferent to variety. Suburban white boys won't listen to Rap because supposedly they can't relate to urban black youths hopping around to all beat and no melody. What we get is music segregation on the airwaves and the record racks.”

Richard Menta American journalist

Source Three Lawsuits and a Funeral http://web.archive.org/web/20031217142538/www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/funeral.html - 11/30/2001 <br class="br">Quotes from the MP3 Newswire

People, Youth, Boy, Indifference

“You really should be able to feel the higher power of music and be moved by it, rather than listening to me waffle on and having to explain it.”

Maynard James Keenan (1964) musician

Steve Morse ( November 15, 1996) "Sonic Evolution With the Use of Tool", Boston Globe, p. D14.

Feeling

“Ascetic rigor? This doesn’t mean something like ‘renounce’ or even a ‘lack’ of something. No, it means, in philosophical manner (and especially in the historic Greek sense of ‘Askesis’), a special kind of internal yearning, a special power wherein, despite all depressions, defeats, and failures you develop a new power to ‘keep’ to something, to create something. It’s something like an obsession. Bach, Mozart, Schubert, they all (and their oeuvre) are filled from this phenomenon, and it’s this spirit which keeps this music so vivid and alive – and fashioned for all times and generations.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Fashion, Failure, Sense, Time

“One of those usual summer Sabbaths. Chores - breakfast - listen aimlessly to radio - swing music - symphony - round table discussion — and then rather aimless reading.”

Virgil John Tangborn (1920–1944)

August 17, 1941

Reading, Summer

“Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right -- music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

Feeling

“I love nice long walks, inspirational novels of influential people. I'm reading Kennedy - An Unfinished Life at the moment. And nothing beats listening to music and having tea with friends.”

Sangeeta Niranjan Fijian businesswoman

Interview with the Fiji Times, 18 September 2005

Love, Life, People, Reading

“I have a feeling it is more or less the same part of my brain which does both [math and music]… they speak to the same place, the same aesthetic…”

Noam Elkies (1966) American mathematician

Response to the question "What is behind this mysterious math-music link?"
Music + Math: A Common Equation?, 1988

Feeling, Parting

“…The subjects we study at school can be divided roughly into two groups—the sciences and the arts. The sciences include mathematics, geography, chemistry, physics, and so on. Among the arts are drawing, painting, modelling, needlework, drama, music, literature. The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, Education, School, Art

“It is not governed by the senseless world of current style that pervades and pollutes popular music, nor is it part of an established hierarchy, so that it is cloistered and protected.”

John Dankworth (1927–2010) British musician

Of jazz. Jazz in Revolution (1998).

World, Parting

“(about her concert in North Korea) "The concert was full of government officials. Every single last seat. It was invitation only, but it was an unbelievable experience. Frightening and exhilarating at the same time. And I just thought about how lucky I am. I am so fortunate to be a musician, and at that moment, I genuinely felt that music is the one and only universal language."”

Sarah Chang (1980) violinist

Newsweek September 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14870541/site/newsweek/?page=6

Universe, Time

“On the artist, Charley Patton, who changed him: What happened was I was going out on a Saturday night, so I went into my mam’s bedroom, she’s got a double mirror, really kitsch 50s. So I’m in there, doing that, and she’s got an old alarm clock where the radio comes on, but she never learned how to do it properly. And it came on. […] I remember it was ten past three in the afternoon and it was winter, it was getting dark, and it was when the BBC had just started doing Telstar live things from America. It was some station in Memphis - one of those classic names, ‘RK 51’ or whatever. […] On it came and there’s this record. The satellite thing was a bit cloudy and it was a 78 record and there was compression on the radio, so it was this strange kind of musical blur with this voice coming through: Charley Patton. […] On that night I told the bass player of one of the local bands that I’d heard this record and it sounded weird, it sounded like a violin. He said, ‘No, it’s not a violin, it’s a slide guitar.’ I thought, ‘What’s one of them?”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2017

Learning, Winter, Change, Past

“A musical event in Münich has brought me a great dolt.... an evening of chamber-music by Arnold Schoenberg (Vienna).... the audience behaved loutishly, like school brats, sneezing and clearing their throats, when not tittering and scraping their chairs, so it was hard to follow the music. Can you imagine a music in which tonality (that is, the adherence to any key) is completely suspended? I was constantly reminded of Kandinsky's large composition which also permits no trace of tonality.... and also of Kandinsky's 'jumping spots' in hearing this music [of Schoenberg], which allows each tone sounded to stand on its own (a kind of white canvas between the spots of color). Schönberg proceeds from the principle that the concepts of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a mere remote consonance – an idea which now occupies me constantly while painting..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

In a letter to August Macke (14 January 1911); as quoted in August Macke; Franz Marc: Briefwechsel, Cologne 1965; as quoted in Boston Modern - Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism, Judith Bookbinder, University Press of New England, Hanover and England, 2005, p. 35
Franz Marc visited a concert with music of the composer Arnold Schönberg on 11 Jan. 1911 with Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter and others; they played there compositions of Schönberg he wrote in 1907 and 1909: his second string quartet and the 'Three piano pieces'
1911 - 1914

School, Color, Imagination, Idea

“Where music dwells
Lingering and wandering on as loth to die,
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Part III, No. 43 - Inside of King's College Chapel, Cambridge.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821)

“In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.”

Charles Mingus (1922–1979) American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader

Statement to Nat Hentoff, as quoted in California Rock, California Sound : The Music of Los Angeles and Southern California (1979) by Anthony Fawcett, p. 56; also in “Jazz : Beyond Time and Nations” in The Nat Hentoff Reader (2001), Part 2 : The Passion of Creation, p. 99

Truth, Change, Time

“You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show.”

David Lee Roth (1954) Rock vocalist; lead singer with Van Halen

Patrick McDonald (October 13, 1988) "David Lee Roth: Outrageous or normal?", The Advertiser.

Star, Learning, Drawing

“The analogy between management and engineering has the unwholesome effect of taking management one further step away from governance. Engineering, like science, music, and theology, knows no national boundaries, and this is why scientists, artists, and theologians— often to their credit— make statesmen uneasy. Such men and women operate from a different normative base from those who govern. Despite the salience of the NAFTAs, the WTOs, and the EUs of this world, governing remains overwhelmingly the business of nation-states.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Source: Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002, p. ix

Women, Men, World, Business

“It was my agenda — value our faith, value our opportunity to grow and better ourselves as believers and citizens of the world. Singing to and for myself and Muslims, I can be more explicate in my lyrics, drawing directly from Islamic sources. Some of my music is naturally a little bit more sensitive to the opinions and feelings of a broader audience — still Islamic in its essence, but more "holistic" and "organic" than dogmatic.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

Beating the drums of hope and faith (2004)

World, Faith, Feeling, Nature

“People dancing all in the street
See the rhythm all in their feet
Life is good, wild and sweet.
Let the music play on (play on, play on)
Feel it in your heart
And feel it in your soul
Let the music take control.”

Lionel Richie (1949) American singer-songwriter, musician, record producer and actor

All Night Long (All Night).
Song lyrics, Can't Slow Down (1983)

Life, People, Feeling, Soul

“All kinds of music are not suited to praise God and to be heard in the sanctuary; all methods of philosophy are not fit for discoursing worthily of God, His power, the principles of His operations, and His mysteries.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Of Freethinkers (23)
Les Caractères (1688)

God

“Money talk tends to be confusing. When people talk money, they usually think “wealth”, “costs”, “profit”, “income”, “gold”, “greed”, “time” (as in “time is money”), or something like that. In everyday discourse money symbolises capitalism, for better or worse: money as the life or evil force of the economy. As sings to us in the classical musical Cabaret: “Money makes the world go round… ”. The tune resonates when people exclaim “money” in response to the question what they are after in life, or when they say that everything people do ultimately revolves around money. All this talk is clear enough. The confusion enters when we observe the very same people who are so enthused about money, stubbornly suppress any reference to money when it comes to goods like the love for their partner, parents and children, friendship, science (truth!) and art (beauty!).”

Arjo Klamer (1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician

Arjo Klamer, and Harry van Dalen. "The double-sidedness of money." Etnofoor 13.2 (2000): 89-103.

Love, Life, Money, Friendship

“Music is never wrong. You might not like it, but it’s never wrong. It's such a great way of explaining stuff.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

Reported in Jay Babcock, " MUSIC IS NEVER WRONG: A visit with Josh Homme & John Paul Jones of Them Crooked Vultures http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/10/15/them-crooked-vultures/", Arthur Magazine (October 15, 2009).

Way

“The term "chorus form" is often used to denote a type of performance - typically in jazz or rhythm 'n' blues, but also sometimes in country music and rock 'n' roll - where a given structural unit is repeated an indefinite number of times. The unit itself may be sectionally elaborate, as in the case of most Tin Pan Alley ballads. It may be twelve-bar blues, or something similar, as in the case of many R&B and rock 'n' roll numbers: here, a three-line AAB lyric, set to a three-phrase melody, is underpinned by a single gestural sweep in the harmony. Occasionally - as in some funk, dub reggae, and hip-hop, for example - it may approach the status of open-ended process.”

Richard Middleton British musicologist

[Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ISBN 0631212639, Middleton, Richard, 1999]

Time, Country

“Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.”

Morton Feldman (1926–1987) American avant-garde composer

Quoted in Remembrance by Tom Johnson (September 1987)

“Machine-held strings of binary digits can simulate a great many kinds of things, of which numbers are just one kind. For example, they can simulate automobiles on a freeway, chess pieces, electrons in a box, musical notes, Russian words, patterns on a paper, human cells, colors, electrical circuits, and so on. To think of a computer as made up essentially of numbers is simply a carryover from the successful use of mathematical analysis in studying models. Most of this series of lectures has been devoted to applications of computers, and this is not the time to give details about their usefulness. I merely wish to point out certain types of things being done with computers today that could not have been done in 1945. Some of these are technological, some are intellectual.”

George Forsythe (1917–1972) Stanford University computer scientist

As cited in: Zenon Pylyshyn (1970) Perspectives on the computer revolution. p. 379
"Educational implications of the computer revolution," 1963

Color, Mathematics, Thinking, Study

“The Pianoforte Sonatas of Beethoven must always be among the choicest possessions of all who love music and especially of those who make music their main object and study.”

Donald Tovey (1875–1940) British composer

Introduction to Tovey's Edition of the Beethoven Sonatas

Love, Study

“My own mystic bent leads me to believe that musical variations, collage, reiteration and process, or evolution, are beautiful. Life is worth living and beauty is worth making.”

Beth Anderson (1950) American neo-romantic composer

Beth Anderson http://www.allmusic.com/artist/beth-anderson-mn0000757980 at allmusic.com, 2013

Life, Beauty

“Remember when the music
Came from wooden boxes strung with silver wire
And as we sang the words, it would set our minds on fire,
For we believed in things, and so we'd sing.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Remember When the Music
Song lyrics, Sequel (1981)

Singing, Box

“French music is really very sensory, and appeals to sense of smell, taste, touch. It can be languorous, and almost erotic. Russian music is very subjective, sometimes whiny, breast-beating 'Look how I suffer, look how I suffer!'. German music is, to use your word, metaphysical. It really asks those existential questions of 'How do I relate to the Universe?', 'Is there a heaven?', 'How am I like a brook, or a leaf on a tree?'. I know this was the music that most challenged Schnabel. He said Mozart was the most inaccessible of the great masters, because with the fewest number of notes, he accesses the deepest levels of human awareness and experience.”

Leon Fleisher (1928) American conductor and pianist

Interview with pianist Leon Fleisher http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-pianist-leon-fleisher by Elijah Ho (October 1, 2014)

Question, Sense, Tree, Suffering

“Roecker sure is a romantic about certain things, like art and music, though you might not know it from watching Live Freaky! Die Freaky!, his claymation musical retelling of the Helter Skelter Charlie Manson saga.”

John Roecker (1966) American film director

[LA Weekly, http://www.laweekly.com/2006-03-02/news/punk-puppet-apocalypse/, LA Weekly LP, Lina, Lecaro, Punk Puppet Apocalypse: Starring members of Green Day, Rancid, X and more, Live Freaky! Die Freaky! is guaranteed to offend, February 28, 2006]
About

Art

“I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of a horse. It is my temper, & I like it the better, to affect all harmony, and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 9
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

Beauty, Horse

“In applications of the music-as-language metaphor we should attend to diverse musical traditions in musical terms, including not only traditions of the music we study but also traditions of how we study music.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Language Models and Musical Analysis", p.54-55.

Study

“(Referring to the music of Anton Bruckner) "Nightmarish hangover style" (traumverwirrten Katzenjammerstil)”

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) austrian musician and musicologist

From Norman Lebrecht, The Book of Musical Anecdotes (1985, Sphere Books)

“My music had roots which I'd dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.”

Ray Charles (1930–2004) American musician

Fooling, Drowning, Hallelujahing, p. 174
Brother Ray : Ray Charles' Own Story (1978)

Childhood

“Music is so personal to me. I can be myself, and say what I want to say. I feel I'm honest and don't try to hide things. But music enables people to learn about my personality, how I'm evolving. Even if I don't feel comfortable talking about something, I can feel comfortable expressing that same thing through my music.”

Hilary Duff (1987) American actress and singer

"Hilary Duff comes to Manchester on Jan. 27" http://www.seacoastonline.com/2004news/dover/12312004/arts/56606.htm. The Dover Community News. December 31 2004. Retrieved October 25 2006. <br class="br">On the recording of Hilary Duff (2004), her third album and second non-holiday album.

People, Feeling, Learning, Personality

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

Women, Men, Art, Intelligence

“I used to do Grade Exams, but my mum will tell you I didn't over-practise for them at all. I never practised, just played. I loved to play. I loved to play a lot* If one mistake is made with young children, it is trying to make them practise rather than just letting them play.' She played hymns at church ('My parents were very religious when we were young') and 'all the Top of the Pops number ones next morning at school. Things like David Bowie's "Life On Mars". That's got a very good piano part. And ever since I was six or seven years old, I always liked Bach - that's why I recorded the Anna Magdalene Notebook, little 16-bar preludes that Bach wrote for children.' I was amazed at how serious the other kids were about the whole thing, much more disciplined than I was, and with this attitude of "Ooh, I can't play sports because I might hurt my fingers" or "I can't listen to pop music because that's really terrible.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Childhood

Love, Life, Children, School

“My life is like a music-hall,
Where, in the impotence of rage,
Chained by enchantment to my stall,
I see myself upon the stage
Dance to amuse a music-hall.”

Arthur Symons (1865–1945) British poet

In The Stalls , st. 1.

Life, Rage, Dance

“It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I'm most interested in. Nearly everything that I've done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

Art, Painting

“… "folk art" signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and not urbanized or industrialized. It is of the essence of this art that those who keep it in being are not only passively receptive, but normally are creative participants in the artistic activities, and yet do not stand out as individuals or claim any personal authorship of the productions. "Popular art" on the other hand is to be understood as artistic or quasi-artistic production for the demand of a half-educated public, generally urban and inclined to mass-behavior. In folk art, producers and consumers are hardly distinguished, and the boundary between them is always fluid; in the case of popular art, we find on the contrary an artistically uncreative, completely passive public, and professional production of artistic goods strictly in response to the demand for them. It is indeed a striking fact that folk art, especially folk-poetry, emerges from the ranks of those who enjoy it, whereas popular songs—the street-ballads and popular "hits"—derive from professionals belonging to and spiritually dependent upon the upper classes.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Arnold Hauser (1985). The philosophy of art history. p. 279

Education, Art, Behavior, Dependency

“To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Big Miniature http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21376/Big_Miniature <br class="br">From the poems written in English

Light, Water, Personality

“We've combined youth, music, sex, drugs, and rebellion with treason!”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

Preface to Rock 'N' Reality: Mirrors of Rock Music--Its Relationship to Sex, Drugs, Family and Religion (1971)

Youth, Sex

“It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can't overestimate it!”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, as quoted in Fortune magazine (12 May 2003)
2000s

History

“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.”

Edward Elgar (1857–1934) English composer

In conversation in 1896, quoted in R J Buckley Sir Edward Elgar (London: Bodley Head, 1905), p. 32.

World, Idea

“John Cage said that music is the moral evaluation of sound. We might generalize his remark: when we speak of art, we make a moral evaluation of the relative worth of the various contributions to a work. It is no surprise that many of the participants differ with more conventional evaluations and rank their own contributions as more important than that of the artist as conventionally defined.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Art Worlds (1982)

Art

“The physiology of orgasm and penile erection no more explain a culture's sexual schema than the auditory range of the human ear explains its music.”

Carole Vance anthropologist

"Social Construction Theory and Sexuality", quoted in Maus, Fred Everett (2004). "Sexual and Musical Categories", The Pleasure of Modernist Music, p.158. ISBN 1580461433

“I'm not going to vote. I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. Maybe I've said that before. My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church.
I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living.
I hate the devotees of great wealth but I enjoy seeing the splendor that wealth can buy. And if I were wealthy, I'd live in a place with marble walls and marble floors, lapis lazulis ceilings and cloth-of-gold and I would have silver fountains in the courts, flinging an everlasting sheen of sparkling water in the air. Soft low music should breathe forever through the rooms and slim tigerish girls should glide through on softly falling feet, serving all the wants of me and my guests; girls with white bare limbs like molten gold and soft dreamy eyes.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (received October 20, 1928)
Letters

Life, God, Hate, Children

Quotes about music page 21

Quotes about music
page 21