“The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.”

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (1962). Expositions and Developments.
1960s

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Igor Stravinsky13

Russian composer, pianist and conductor 1882–1971

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“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

“A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40-46
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

“There’s a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn’t have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual.”

John Williams (1932) American composer, conductor and pianist

John Williams, quoted from the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial CD liner notes

“Through instrumental music, I’m allowed to come up with musical ideas that allow the listener to create their own impression of my song. If you add lyrics about a girl in the song, the listener doesn’t have a choice of what the song is about, it’s told to them. My musical writings allow me to express anything. It’s easier for me to tell a story of something I’ve encountered this way then to verbalize it. And my feelings are explored more in my compositions compared to what I could ever say in a few sentences.”

Bradley Joseph (1965) Composer, pianist, keyboardist, arranger, producer, recording artist

[Janus, Cicily, Radinsky, Ned, http://newfaceofjazz.com/?page_id=594, New Faces of Jazz: Bradley Joseph, (newfaceofjazz.com), 2010-08-01]

“Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seem to be beside the point—even when the attribution is authoritative, even when it is made by the composer himself.”

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

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 3 : Explaining the Obvious

“Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

As quoted in Debussy (1989) by Paul Holmes, p. 36
Context: Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.

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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.

“I make art in and for the experience itself — to satisfy a need to express myself in a creative, colorful, non-verbal way.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Introduction to the Art gallery at his website (2006) http://robertfulghum.com/index.php/fulghumweb/artshowentry/introduction2/ <br class="br">Context: I don't do art to address other people but to address myself. I've never done art with a thought of being a professional artist who makes a living by selling his art. I've never had a commercial show in a gallery. I suppose I'm like those who write poetry or songs without seeking publication. I make art in and for the experience itself — to satisfy a need to express myself in a creative, colorful, non-verbal way.

“Speech has arisen through the need for expression. Certain factors have contributed to making it the paramount utilitarian method of expression. There are ideas and things expressible in words, but there are ideas better expressed in music, the person with no musical ear, or without discipline in the language of music, lacks the key to the door of the world of musical experience. But we live in a world of volume and space; it is hard to conceive of the person who is space-blind or volume-deaf. The great majority of people have the means of approach to plastic beauty as part of their natural equipment. The teacher can develop this natural endowment as Necessity, the greatest teacher, has developed speech.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 57
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

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Igor Stravinsky13

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