Quotes about music
page 26

“On May 17, 1969, a show which was to become the seminal exhibition of video art in the U. S. opened at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. That exhibition, "TV as a Creative Medium," effectively pointed to the diverse potential of a new art form and social tool. Subsequently, the show became renowned for the inspiration it provided for many artists and future advocates of video. The artists represented in the show, a few of whom are still involved in the medium today, came from varied backgrounds-painting, filmmaking, nuclear physics, avant-garde music and performance, kinetic and light sculpture-and their approaches presented a primer of the directions which video would soon take. Theoretically, they variously saw video as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience, a mirror, an electronic palette, a kinetic sculpture, or acultural machine to be deconstructed. Ripe with ideas and armed with a heady optimism about the future of communications, these artists used video as an information tool and as a means of gaining understanding and control of television, not solely as an art form. In "TV as a Creative Medium" alternative television was presented as a stepping stone to the promised communications utopia.”

Marita Sturken (1957) American academic

Marita Sturken. " TV as a Creative Medium: Howard Wise and Video Art http://www.vasulka.org/archive/4-30c/AfterImageMay84(1004).pdf," in: Afterimage, May 1984

Art, Communication, Idea, Optimism

“If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Silence is Golden,” p. 59
Do What You Will (1928)

Love, Rage

“Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

La peinture est le plus beau de tous les arts; en lui se résument toutes les sensations, à son aspect chacun peut, au gré de son imagination, créer le roman, d'un seul coup d'œil avoir l'âme envahie par les plus profonds souvenirs; point d'effort de mémoire, tout résumé en un seul instant. — Art complet qui résume tous les autres et les complète. — Comme la musique, il agit sur l'âme par l'intermédiaire des sens, les tons harmonieux correspondant aux harmonies des sons; mais en peinture on obtient une unité impossible en musique où les accords viennent les uns après les autres, et le jugement éprouve alors une fatigue incessante s'il veut réunir la fin au commencement. En somme, l'oreille est un sens inférieur à celui de l'œil. L'ouïe ne peut servir qu'à un seul son à la fois, tandis que la vue embrasse tout, en même temps qu'à son gré elle simplifie.
Quote of Gauguin from: Notes Synthéthiques (ca. 1884-1885), ed. Henri Mahaut, in Vers et prose (July-September 1910), p. 52; translation from John Rewald, Gauguin (Hyperion Press, 1938), p. 161.
1870s - 1880s

Beauty, Art, Soul, Imagination

“Hence the ancient architects, following in the footsteps of nature, perfected the ascending rows of seats in theatres from their investigations of the ascending voice, and by means of the canonical theory of the mathematicians and that of the musicians, endeavoured to make every voice uttered on the stage come with greater clearness and sweetness to the ears of the audience. For just as musical instruments are brought to perfection of clearness in the sound of their strings by means of bronze plates or horn, so the ancients devised methods of increasing the power of the voice in theatres through the application of harmonics.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book V, Chapter IV, Sec. 8

Nature, Perfection

“Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.”

Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) American philosopher

Feeling and Form, ch. 1, p. 27, Scribner (1953)

Life

“Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries.”

Clifford Odets (1906–1963) Playwright, screenwriter, director, actor

Mr. Bonaparte, in Golden Boy (1937), Act I, sc. ii

Country

“Life? or Theater?' - A Play with Music - C. S.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 1st introduction page, related to image JHM no. 4155-1 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charlotte_Salomon_-_JHM_4155.jpg: 'Life? or Theater..', p. 41 written in brush - her title is indicating the close relation for her between drama, music, text and painting Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Life

“We'll all turn black
So who's to know?
As a matter of fact,
Color, creed and breed must go.
There will be no light,
So there can be no sight.
And you'll judge your fellow man;
Understand bout what is right.
A million music, a million sound
There's neutral thoughts
For the underground.”

Curtis Mayfield (1942–1999) American singer, songwriter, and record producer

Underground, from Roots (1971).
Song lyrics

Color, Understanding, Light

“In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, act V, scene 1, we find this exchange between the two young lovers: JESSICA: I am never merry when I hear sweet music
LORENZO: The reason is, your spirits are attentiveThe opening of the finale of Beethoven' s 'Emperor' Concerto provides a splendid example of the kind of theme that is the inspiration for this book. A completely unified theme that hangs together beautifully, it nevertheless portrays vividly a series of contrasting sentiments in a succession that amounts to a small narrative …”

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

Prologue
Music and Sentiment (2010)

Books, Lovers, Success

“I've bought more music for my Ipod in one year than I bought in the last ten years of my life.”

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

thestrippodcast.com (September 9, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life

“Music is life and, like it, inextinguishable.”

Carl Nielsen

Motto at the top of the score of his Symphony 4: Inextinguishable

Life

“Music was as natural as breathing in our house.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

Hats, Hunches And Happiness (1945)

Nature, Housing

“No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But…the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between present sensibility and the general sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, allowing for an ever-evolving dialogue between the vanished past and the evanescent present.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Reading Mozart's Music", p.43.

Past

“Music exalts each joy, allays each grief,
Expels diseases, softens every pain,
Subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.”

John Armstrong (1709–1779) British poet

Book IV, line 512.
The Art of Preserving Health (1744)

Pain, Disease, Rage, Joy

“It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he has done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music — his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming — so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Dreams, Way, Soul, Sleep

“What do you think of Puccini?
[ Britten: "I think his operas are dreadful." ]
No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music.”

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist

Quoted in Lord Harewood The Tongs and the Bones (1981) p. 133.

Thinking

“I always dreamed in my youth of a great, consuming love. I was often disappointed and returned each time to my music for consolation. It never failed me.”

Pierre Monteux (1875–1964) French conductor

From Monteux, Doris G (1965). It's All in the Music: The Life and Work of Pierre Monteux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. OCLC 604146,, p. 198

Love, Youth, Dreams, Disappointment

“Music is 99% of my life. But I know I need a break. Besides, if you give people too much, they start to not want it. We need to restrain ourselves.”

Billy Corgan (1967) American musician, songwriter, producer, and author

USA Today. Date???

Life, People

“The soul of music slumbers in the shell
Till waked and kindled by the master's spell;
And feeling hearts, touch them but rightly, pour
A thousand melodies unheard before!”

Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) British poet

Human Life (1819)

Feeling, Soul, Heart

“First and foremost, I'd like to continue taking risks with my music. Everything I've done so far has been a gut reaction, honest and real. And that's who I am. That's what I want my music to always be -- honest and real.”

Josh Groban (1981) American musician and actor

Chicago Sun Times, 11/16/03

“I don't think that American audiences would accept the tonal character of my music.”

Akira Ifukube (1914–2006) Japanese composer

As quoted by David Milner, "Akira Ifukube Interview I" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/ifukub.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1992)

Thinking

“If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music.”

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) Finnish composer of the late Romantic period

Interview with Berlingske Tidende, June 10, 1919. http://www.sibelius.fi/english/omin_sanoin/ominsanoin_16.htm

“To me, this is very boring music—most of it. It has nothing happening. Nothing is sticking. They’re playing music perfectly with wonderful intonation and technique, but it’s dangerous for jazz itself. I do wish these people all the best.”

Joe Zawinul (1932–2007) austrian composer and pianist

On Wynton Marsalis and the revival of traditional jazz
Prasad interview (1997)

People

“If there is a God, he or she or it or whatever higher power there is is behind us so long as we're using our music in an inspirational way. I'm here for a reason, and I was given a talent, so I'll continue to try to use it.”

Bert McCracken (1982) American musician

Source: Staff (November 5, 2004) "Who's your homeboy? To devotees of The Used, Bert McCracken is a higher power", Home News Tribune, p. E4.

God, Way

“The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted.”

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004) film composer

ibid., p. 209

“It always seemed to me they’re sort of alike,” he said, “magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

“Darkrose and Diamond” (p. 110)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“Being a mom is my number one job. My son [Nayib, 27] lives in Los Angeles and he has his own company where he works on music and film projects, but he calls me every day. Emily [who is 12] is very athletic; she plays tennis and basketball. I love going to her games. If she needs help with her home work, I'll sit with her. She also is very musical -- she writes poetry and plays the guitar. I always tell both my kids, "Find what makes you happy. The money will come regardless of what you do, and more or less of it is not going to be what makes you happy. Spending hours at something you enjoy will."”

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

Latina Magazine (September, 2007)
2007, 2008

Love, Money, Happiness, Angels

“I want to write music. I want to sit down right now at the piano, and write a song that people will listen to and remember. And do the same thing every morning for the rest of my life.”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

tick, tick... BOOM! (1990)

Life, People

“Good ideas are infinitely available. We've just limited our availablitly to them. The music's not in the radio.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

3 December 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/6297004027 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Idea

“I think heavy metal is therapeutic - it's music that blows the tension away. I think that's why people who have had really bad childhoods are attracted to heavy metal. It allows people to release aggression and tension in a nonviolent way. Also, heavy metal seems to attract all sorts of scruffy, lost animals, strays no one wants.”

Kirk Hammett (1962) American musician

Playboy (April 2001)

People, Way, Thinking, Animals

“I wasn’t reluctant about it. I’ve had so many fans online and at shows ask for my old material that I was surprised. So when I had the chance to release my back catalog on iTunes it was really for the fans. I’m still surprised when a fan comes up to me and ask about F. O. O. D. I want to please those fans that have enjoyed my previous albums and I also want to be able to see the progression of my music for posterity sake.”

Danny! (1983) American rapper

On having no reservations about re-releasing pre-Definitive Jux material (PopMatters interview http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/70881-flavor-for-your-ear-eventually-an-interview-with-danny/, 2009) Interviews

Chance

“…if the music stops and there's only the sound of the rain
All the hope and glory -- All the sacrifice in vain
(And) If love remains, though everything is lost
We will pay the price, but we will not count the cost
-- Bravado”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

1991
Rush Lyrics

Love, Hope

“As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
on floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood
lies”

Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972) American writer and poet

" As We Are So Wonderfully Done With Each Other http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/as-we-are-so-wonderfully-done-with-each-other/"

Sleep, Childhood

“Udnie – I see Again in Memory my Dear Udnie' is no more the portrait of a young girl than 'Edtaonisl' (counterpart of his work 'Udnie'] is the image of a prelate, as we ordinarily conceive of them. They are [both] memories of America, evocations of over there which, subtly set down like musical chords, become representative of an idea, a nostalgia, a fleeting impression.”

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) French painter and writer

'Udnie – I see Again in Memory my Dear Udnie' is the title of a painting, he made in 1913; a memory of the dances performed by Stasia Napierkowska on the ship to New York, to visit the w:Armory Show, where Picabia was presented in 1913 as a 'leading Cubist painter'
1910's
Source: 'Ecrits: vol. 1', 1913 - 1920, Picabia, Belfond, Paris, p. 26

Girl, Idea, Nostalgia, Memory

“I saw the 'Popstars' programme and to me it looked more like 'Opportunity Knocks' than the kind of cutting-edge postmoderism that The Guardian would like to have us believe it was. I think what it's more about is the public and the music industry's bloodlust. It's just like someone itching to say 'Oh, confound it all, let's bring back hanging, that was good entertainment.”

Luke Haines (1967) English musician and songwriter

http://uk.news.launch.yahoo.com/dyna/article.html?a=dotmusic_news/20674.html&e=l_news_dm

Thinking

“We can see that canonic status is accorded to the works of a composer not by posterity, or at least not by a posterity as distant in time as is sometimes thought; nor does it depend very much on whether the works are frequently performed for the public in every important musical center. To a certain extent, canonic status is actually built into some new works, partly by the way they impose themselves on an already substantial musical tradition. This may explain why it is so difficult to alter a firmly installed canon in any radical way, or to dislodge works that have been an integral part of it for some time.”

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

Way, Distant, Time, Parting

“When I was little, I saw the play Les Misérables on Broadway, I thought it was the most amazing thing I have ever seen. So I went to my manager and told him I wanted to be in it. He asked me if I could sing, and I said no. I took one lesson and landed the role of Cosette in a national tour of the musical”

Ashley Tisdale (1985) American actress, singer

Tisdale about her early life. People Magazine. "Ashley Tisdale's Biography" http://www.people.com/people/ashley_tisdale. People. August 7 2004. Retrieved August 7 2008. On her Biography Ashley Tisdale. (2006)

Singing

“The musical language which made the classical style possible is that of tonality, which was not a massive, immobile system but a living, gradually changing language from its beginning. It had reached a new and important turning point just before the style of Haydn and Mozart took shape.”

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

Part I. Introduction. 1. The Musical Language of the Late Eighteenth Century
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

Change

“Well, if you compare my album even as late as two years ago, I think as a writer I am much more at the forefront. I wrote all the lyrics and lots of the music on that album. It shows humor of the writer side of me. But I have evolved since then.”

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

answer to question "How different is your music now from what it was 20 years ago?"
2006

Thinking

“Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records. The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on.”

Grandmaster Flash (1958) musician

Quoted in Rap Attack 2 (1991) by David Toop, p. 62 ISBN 1852422432

Waiting

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

"Cornel West interviewed by bell hooks" in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991)

People, World, Religion, Art

“And Music is an art which likes people to laugh and sing and dance. It cares nothing for melancholy, nor for a man who sorrows over what is of no importance, but ignores, instead, such folk. It brings joy everywhere it's present; it comforts the disconsolate, and just hearing it makes people rejoice.”

Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377) French poet and composer

Et musique est une science
Qui veut qu'on rie et chante et dance.
Cure n'a de merencolie,
Ne d'homme qui merencolie
A chose qui ne puet valoir,
Eins met tels gens en nonchaloir.
Partout ou elle est joie y porte;
Les desconfortez reconforte,
Et nes seulement de l'oir
Fait elle les gens resjoir.
"Le Prologue", line 85; translation from Ross W. Duffin (ed.) A Performer's Guide to Medieval Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) p. 190.

People, Art, Singing, Joy

“Music is my life, if I am without music or if I can't sing any more, I die, I'm nothing…because music is everything.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Life, Singing

“I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song, […] It's more like you write what comes to you… You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave…”

Eddie Vedder (1964) musician, songwriter, member of Pearl Jam

L.A. Times 5/1/94, "He Didn't Ask for All This".

Cars, Feeling, Mood, Time

“When I want to play music, you've got to get me on tape or else it goes.”

Joe Satriani (1956) American guitar player

As quoted in Guitar 2001 magazine, Issue #10, (Summer 2001).

“What we are slaves to will prevent us from praying to God. If we are slaves to all the thoughts we think, if we are slaves to everything our eyes see, if we are slaves to all the music our ears hear, if we are slaves to everything the nose smells and the tongue tastes, if we are slaves to everything the body wants, then how can we ever reach a state of peace? We can never know peace or tranquility this way. We have to escape from this slavery and become a slave only to God.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

God, Peace, Way, Thinking

“Mythology, science, space exploration, these are subjects that have fascinated me since my early childhood. And they were always connected somehow with the music I write.”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

2001

Science, Childhood

“Music is made up of a large number of individual sounds, and is either a single melody or a part-song.”

Johannes Tinctoris (1435–1511) Flemish composer

Dictionary of Musical Terms (1475)

Parting

“[A. Merriam] neglects to take sufficiently into account the possibilities of critical musical analysis as though from within the culture, be it by a native or a native-trained foreigner.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, review of A. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music, p.171, 167.

Training

“I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' I said, 'Well then, I'll beat my head against that wall.' I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that involved noises.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote from an interview in Observer magazine (1982), repeated on several occasions
1980s

Feeling

“Art and music make manifest, by bringing into conscious awareness, that which has previously been felt only tentatively and internally. Art, in its widest sense, is a form of play that lies at the origin of all making, of language, and of the mind's awareness of its place within the world. Art, in all its forms, makes manifest the spiritual dimension of the cosmos, and expresses our relationship to the natural world. This may have been the cause of that natural light which first illuminated the preconscious minds of early hominids.”

F. David Peat (1938–2017) British physicist

Pathways of Chance (2007).

World, Art, Nature, Sense

“The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich's symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something.”

Dmitri Shostakovich book Testimony

Page 137
Testimony (1979)

“My father was a violinist, my mother a pianist. I was born into a world of music... The practicing of my father's pupils accompanied every thought and action of my childish life.... Then when I was thirty [c. 1906], my career as musician was brought to an end by Vollard [art-dealer in Paris] who bought all the pictures I possessed, pictures which I had painted over several years with unbounded enthusiasm during such hours of freedom as I was able to spare between [music]-lessons to my pupils.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 27

Life, World, Art, Freedom

“And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency. … It's my job and my vice mixed together. You can't hope for better than that: having your job and your sin commingled.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)

Love, Life, Hope

“Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you:
Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you:
No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat.
Dreams—they are madness. Staring eyes—illusion.
Let us return, hear music, and forget...”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Dreams, Madness, Forgetting

“We wanted to start a magazine, and Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman from the band Bratmobile had started a little fanzine called Riot Grrrl and we were writing little things for it. I'd always wanted to start a big magazine with really cool, smart writing in it, and I wanted to see if the other punk girls in D. C. that I was meeting were interested in that. So I called a meeting and found a space for it, and it just turned into this sort of consciousness-raising thing. I realized really quickly that a magazine wasn't the way to go. People wanted to be having shows, and teaching each other how to play music, and writing fanzines, so that started happening. It got some press attention, and girls in other places would be like "I wanna do that. I wanna start one of those."”

Kathleen Hanna (1968) American musician and feminist activist

Index Magazine (2000).
On riot grrrl

People, Way, Girl, Wolf

“The aesthetic dimensions of science, like that of great classical music, are evident to the aficionado.”

Varadaraja V. Raman (1932) American physicist

page 299
Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

Science

“Once cannot tame the voices of the flute, voices of such uncanny lightness yet miracle of being that they are able to tilt the two rivers, the visible and the invisible rivers, into diagrammatic discourse; and in so doing to create the four banks of the river of space into a ladder upon which the curved music of the flute ascends. Those banks are dislodged upwards into rungs in the ladder and into stepping stones into original space.”

Wilson Harris (1921–2018) Guyanese writer

The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990)

Light

“The major difference between Astaire and Kelly is a difference, not of talent or technique, but of levels of sophistication. On the face of it, Kelly looks the more sophisticated. Where Kelly has ideas, Astaire has dance steps. Where Kelly has smartly tailored, dramatically apt Comden and Green scripts, Astaire in the Thirties made do with formulas derived from nineteenth-century French Farce. But the Kelly film is no longer a dance film. It's a story film with dances, as distinguished from a dance film with a story. When Fred and Ginger go into their dance, you see it as a distinct formal entity, even if it's been elaborately built up to in the script. In a Kelly film, the plot action and the musical set pieces preserve a smooth community of high spirits, so that the pressure in a dance number will often seem too low, the dance itself plebeian or folksy in order to "match up" with the rest of the picture.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Arlene Croce, in Croce, Arlene. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, W.H. Allen, London, 1974. p. 7. ISBN 0491001592.

Communication, Idea, Dance

“If all our political and intellectual elite offers by way of a national culture is “pop music, gambling, fashionable clothes or television,” then we can neither mount a convincing intellectual defense against our enemies, nor hope to integrate intelligent, inquiring, and unfulfilled Muslim youths—young men principally, of course—to our way of life.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

The Cost of Frivolity http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-02-01td.html (February 1, 2007). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Life, Men, Youth, Hope

“His writings include works on mechanics, sound, astronomy, the tides, the laws of motion, the Torricellian tube, botany, physiology, music, the calendar (in opposition to the Gregorian reform), geology, and the compass,—a range too wide to allow of the greatest success in any of the lines of his activity. He was also an ingenious cryptologist and assisted the government in deciphering diplomatic messages.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

History of Mathematics (1923) Vol.1

Law, Success

“Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things. On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, "I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent." And I said, "Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something."”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did.
http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/160603396711/hi-i-read-that-youve-dealt-with-with-impostor (2017)

People, Thinking, Night

“People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

Love, People, Books, Education

“For me the intentions of background music are openly political, and an example of how political power is constantly shifting from the ballot box into areas where the voter has nowhere to mark his ballot paper. The most important political choices in the future will probably never be consciously exercised. I'm intrigued by the way some background music is surprisingly aggressive, especially that played on consumer complaint phone lines and banks, airplanes and phone companies themselves, with strident non-rhythmic and arms-length sequences that are definitely not user-friendly.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

As quoted in Elevator Music (1994) by Joseph Lanza

Way, Exercises, Future, Box

“He is terribly rare. He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

George Balanchine in Nabokov, Ivan and Carmichael, Elizabeth. "Balanchine, An Interview". Horizon, January 1961, pp. 44-56. (M).

Knowledge, Time, Dance

“Folk music is always considered a good thing. There is a catch, however: it has to be "real" folk music, anonymous, evoking not an individual but a communal personality, expressive of the soil.”

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

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Communication, Personality

“Consider an opening musical number set in a maternity ward, where Tommy Pickles and his friends Chuckie Finster and Phil and Lil DeVille are hoping for a look at Tommy's new kid brother, Dilbert. (Dil Pickles — get it? For Rugrats fans, this is humor of the highest order.) They wake up the babies, who do a number that seems inspired by Bubsy Berkeley, except that the Berkeley girls never had to supply their own dancing waters, if you get my drift.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-rugrats-movie-1998 of The Rugrats Movie (20 November 1998) Reviews, Two star reviews

Hope, Girl, Water, Dance

“When I was a few years, often approached the door of the room where my mother exactly practicing, listened to sounds and imagined this music.”

Łukasz Pawlikowski (1997) Polish cellist

Kiedy miałem kilka lat, często podchodziłem do drzwi pokoju, w którym akurat ćwiczyła mama, wsłuchiwałem się w dźwięki i wyobrażałem sobie tę muzykę. A little cellist from Krakow conquers the world, warszawa.naszemiasto.pl, 2008-04-02, Polish http://warszawa.naszemiasto.pl/archiwum/1664386,maly-wiolonczelista-z-krakowa-podbija-swiat,id,t.html,

Imagination

“I decided then and there that the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms were the only music for me, not the music of this crazy Russian. … My one desire was to flee that room and find a quiet corner in which to rest my aching head. Then Diaghilev turned to me and with a smile said, "This is a masterpiece, Monteux, which will completely revolutionize music and make you famous, because you are going to conduct it."”

Pierre Monteux (1875–1964) French conductor

And, of course, I did.
Quoted in Monteux, Doris G (1965). It's All in the Music: The Life and Work of Pierre Monteux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. OCLC 604146, p. 91
On first hearing The Rite of Spring

Smile

“The trend in the north is more Punjabi folk and simple music. But, in the past, people like Naushad experimented with Hindustani classical music which I think has been completely forgotten. People don't experiment anymore and think that Hindustani classical music won't work. For me, coming from the south, it was just a little step to learn Punjabi music. The nuances are louder in Punjabi music. Songs like Mukkala muqqabla or Humma humma had more of the Tamil folk music in it.”

A. R. Rahman (1966) Indian singer and composer

The A R Rahman Chat

People, Thinking, Learning, Past

“Right now I'm listening to a lot of Top 40 music, because THAT'S MY JOB.”

"Weird Al" Yankovic (1959) American singer-songwriter, music producer, accordionist, actor, comedian, writer, satirist, and parodist

Weird Al Yankovic tackles Life's BIG Questions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpZxwRzAD6c&list=PLBEFACC86EF5C5A1B.

“Nudes -- stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons' pantomine
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the glibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep's trumpet.”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

On Receiving News of the War (1914), Louse Hunting

Business, Sleep, Rage

“You start out with simple concepts,.. All of this beautiful edifice of geometry, for example, comes out of this configuration of lines and points… Think of the simple opening--dum dum dum dum!--of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In music you start out with a trivial motif and it turns into this beautiful, intricate composition,… Again, it all stems from this small, very simple idea.”

Noam Elkies (1966) American mathematician

Talking about "a stark, basic principle underpins even the most complex symphony or mathematical application."
Music + Math: A Common Equation?, 1988

Beauty, Idea, Thinking

“I find above all that the expression, "atonal music," is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying "the art of not falling," or swimming "the art of not drowning."”

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Austrian-American composer

"Hauer's Theories" (Notes of November 1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 210
1920s

Art, Flying

“I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 14 (p. 175)

“For the first time a subject is present, not by virtue of its absence, but actually present, though its appearance is torn away, and only the structure bared. The Modern City! Precise, rectangular, squared, whether seen from above, below, or on the side; bright lights and sterilized life; Broadway, whites and blacks; and boogie-woogie; the underground music of the at once resigned and rebellious... Mondrian has left his white paradise, and entered the world.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

1942, on the late painting 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' of Piet Mondrian
Quote of Rothko, in Painters Objects, Robert Motherwell, pp. 95, 96; as cited in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, pp. 128-129
1940's

Life, World, Light, Appearance

“The author's conviction on this day of the New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”

Ezra Pound book ABC of Reading

Preface
ABC of Reading (1934)

Dance

“If you pass the light from a sodium flash through a prism, you get a pattern very different from the familiar continuous rainbow that Newton elicited from natural sunlight. Instead of a continuous pattern, in which all gradations of pure color are apparently represented, the sodium flash generates a series of lines of light. …in the musical analogy, sodium produces a chord where sunlight produced all possible tones—"white noise."”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Other elements produce other chords.
Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Color, Nature, Light

“But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?”

James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) Poet

To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence (l. 9-12)

Love, Wine

“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…”

Robert Fripp (1946) English guitarist, composer and record producer

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

Chance

“The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.”

Ned Rorem (1923–2022) American composer

[Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day, ISBN 041522974X, 2001, Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (eds)]

“Donald Trump and producer Mark Burnett are reportedly considering creating a Broadway musical based on The Apprentice. The pair came up with the idea when neither one of them could find a match to set fire to a pile of money.”

Amy Poehler (1971) American actress

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/04/04jupdate.phtml
Weekend Update samples

Money, Idea

“There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"A Death of Kings"
Extraterritorial (1971)

Age, Mathematics

“My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Interview with John C. Tibbetts http://www.murphywong.net/barzuncentennial/JohnCTibbetts.htm (1986-12-04)

Reading

“The music broke from the piano like clear cold water from a prophet-touched rock, pouring and splashing around us while her fingers leaped and spread, curled and stiffened and melted and flickered in magic pass and streaked lightning above the keyboard. Never before had she played for me… because we were lovers now, was she free to play…?”

Richard Bach book The Bridge Across Forever

The Bridge Across Forever (1984)

Lovers, Water

“Genius doth catch the music of the spheres,
Which mortal ear was never meant to know.
Genius can penetrate the mysteries
Of feeling, all unknown to other hearts;
A power hath entered in the inmost soul,
Whose presence may not be contained.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Translations, From the French

Feeling, Soul, Heart

“Music bypasses the intellect, it makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you want to dance, makes you want to have sex.”

Siobhan Fahey (1958) singer and songwriter in Banarama and Shakespears Sister

G3 interview (2002)

Sex, Dance, Cry

“The world has spilled Love's secret —
when could music ever hold its tongue?
Every atom babbles the mystery”

Fakhruddin 'Iraqi (1213–1289) Persian philosopher

Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)

Love, Secret, World

“I remember when I was doing a film with Fred Astaire, it was nothing for him to work three or four days on two bars of music. One evening in the dark grey hours of dusk, I was walking across the deserted MGM lot when a small, weary figure with a towel around his neck suddenly appeared out of the giant cube sound stages. It was Fred. He came over to me, threw a heavy arm around my shoulder and said: "Oh Alan, why doesn't someone tell me I cannot dance?" The tormented illogic of his question made any answer insipid, and all I could do was walk with him in silence.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Alan Jay Lerner in Lerner, Alan Jay. On the Street Where I Live. New York: Norton, 1978. p. 89. (M).

Question, Silence, Appearance, Dance

“Music… is… a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

Way, Behavior

“When entering the studio, I don't know what will happen. I do a so-called trip into myself: I sit down at the piano and the melody might start to evolve from my playing or then I might start to sing it. At that stage I do not yet have clear ideas about what kind of emotions I would like to express. Until I play the completed piece to Roma and Nicky and when I observe their reactions, the music gets its meaning…”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Anna interview (2005)

Idea, Singing

“In order to win over Paris and appear, in the eyes of all Europe, an absolute innovator, the most advanced of all, I urge you to get to work with all your heart, resolute on being bolder, crazier, more advanced, surprising, eccentric, incomprehensible, and grotesque than anybody else in music. I urge you to be a madman.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

Marinetti (1910); as quoted in: Lawrence Rainey (2005) Modernism: An Anthology, p. 2
1910's

Appearance, Heart

“[on Phil Anselmo] I think that he's probably one of the more enigmatic frontman of our time. He's tremendously inspirational to vocalists throughout the genre including myself. I know that there's some weirdness regarding the "incident," but I certainly know that Phil would have never in his darkest thoughts ever have wanted any harm to befall Dime. You know the world is a very, very extreme place. When a fan gets so connected to a band that the demise of the band, however they want to interpret it, leads them to question their own lives and their existence… I mean it's weird. There are too many types of music that inspire that passion in people and thankfully metal is one of them. It's just unfortunate that this animal happened to take the demise of Pantera so seriously that he felt that it was justification for him to do what he did. He took the life of probably one of the greatest guitar players to walk the face of the Earth.”

David Draiman (1973) American singer and songwriter

David Draiman talks disturbing thoughts http://www.concertlivewire.com/interviews/disturbed.htm, concertlivewire.com, 19 February 2005)

Life, People, World, Question

“[I'm] Very positive about the internet, Napster. I think it's a tremendous tool for reaching many more people than we ever could without it. When you release music you want it to be heard by people… Nothing is going to do that better than Napster. I can't tell you how many kids have come up to me and said, "I downloaded a couple of tunes off Napster and I went out and bought the album."…I don't really make money off of record sales anyway.”

David Draiman (1973) American singer and songwriter

Interview with David Draiman of Disturbed http://www.nyrock.com/interviews/2001/disturbed_int.asp, NY Rock, July 2001)

Money, People, Thinking

“I really believe that the marijuana laws are a terrible injustice. They make no sense scientifically, ethically, legally, or any way. They cost a fortune to enforce and we incarcerate hundreds of thousands of people who have done nothing else, but possess or distribute marijuana. Maybe it's because I'm a child of the 60's and marijuana has been such a positive part of my life. I have never seen it as being addictive, having spent weeks, and months, and days of my life (and years) without using marijuana in any form. For me, it's a kind of a sacrament, something that should be used wisely and in the context of a loving family existence. […] There's a place for alcohol too, but there's no reason why adults shouldn't be allowed to do something which not only doesn't add harm to themselves or others, but is a way to enhance the beauty of life, the beauty of eating, of listening to music, of being with friends and family, of being with the one you love.”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Ann Druyan – from her video podcast At Home in the Cosmos with Annie Druyan. — OVGuide. "Ann Druyan – A Plea for a Change in the Marijuana Laws Video" http://www.ovguide.com/ann-druyan-9202a8c04000641f8000000000008b85 (Podcast). published by Ann Druyan. Retrieved 2013-10-02.

Love, Life, People, Alcohol

“But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins, From the Afterword, The Herald Scotland, (November 20, 2006) http://www.heraldscotland.com/from-the-afterword-1.836155

Death, Dogs, Mathematics, Question

“Having a tradition is a great thing to work within, and maybe today [it] is the only way to really land musically dramatic work.”

Alan Menken (1949) American musical theatre and film composer and pianist.

Inside Movies interview 24 Nov 2010 http://insidemovies.ew.com/2010/11/24/alan-menken-tangled/.

Way

“Science is not an impersonal construction. It is no less, and no more, personal than any other form of communicated thought. …Science searches the common experience of people; and it is made by people, and it has their style. …The style of Newton's work, as much as the content, dominated science for two centuries… The science of an age, like its art or its music, has style… But it has content and structure too, larger than the work of any one man…”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Scientific Revolution and the Machine"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

People, Age, Art, Search

“Bad boys have long fascinated audiences as well as storytellers, whatever the medium. Such rebels, often without causes beyond self-gratification, have been at the center of much of contemporary popular culture. One of the paradigms for such dramatized morality tales is Mozart's magnificent "Don Giovanni," whose musical and theatrical turns evoked awe and laughter and terror from the more that 1,500 music fans who on Saturday night flocked to Lawrence's Lied Center for the Mozart Festival Opera production. The libertine is thoroughly disreputable. Nonetheless, we look on in fascination because of his devilish smile, dashing good looks, ready wit, and the audacity of his hyper-inflated ego. If you can imagine a young Jack Nicholson with mustache, cape and a flair for sword play, you've got it. Lithuanian baritone Vytautas Juozapaitis gave the Don appropriate swagger and voice. He also brought a comic twist that gave the roué a touch of the trickster. Stepping out of character for a second in the midst of a briskly paced recitative, he paused, turned, and looked up at the supertitled English translation as if to check his lines. It was a joke shared by all. The pleasure of performing, even in the opera's most dramatic moments, was evident.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Chuck Berg, "Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' triumphs", Topeka Capital Journal (February, 2007) http://www.jennykellyproductions.com/prod_mozart_review.htm

Pleasure, Smile, Imagination, Boy

“Susan [Silver] gives me a huge amount of room to be that recluse, and also the incentive to not be. It’s worth a lot to see her be excited about being around someone who’s not afraid of his shadow. It’s good for her. She digs it. But we’re becoming more alike. When she comes home to me from a day at the office, where she’s talking to people from all over the world about all sorts of important things… well, I probably haven’t answered the phone in seventy-two hours. She knows that when she comes home she’s going to get privacy, because I’m not like ‘These are my South American friends and… honey, have you ever really listened to that first Van Halen album?’ She’s the best roommate I’ve ever had. People are sort of perplexed, as to how this could possibly work in this grunge-music, super-druggy era where everybody is so emotionally screwed up. Not only is Soundgarden not OD’ing on heroin, but the singer’s wife manages the band, there’s no weird Yoko Ono trip, and she’s not trying to make us dress up like lions and unicorns.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

When asked if intimacy is an issue in his marriage to Soundgarden's manager Susan Silver ** Interview with Details Magazine, December 1996 https://pitchfork.com/features/article/10081-chris-cornell-searching-for-solitude/, Soundgarden Era

People, World, Home

Quotes about music page 26

Quotes about music
page 26