“The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer
“Notes don't make music until you learn to insert silence between them.”
Studio http://www.benfolds.com/studio <br class="br">Song lyrics, BenFolds.com
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Ben Folds18
American musician 1966Related quotes
“Music is the space between the notes.”
Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer
As quoted in Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving (2001) by Jonathan G. Koomey, p. 96; since at least 2010 similar statements are also sometimes attributed to Mozart, and a similar remark, apparently one of Ben Jonson, is quoted in "Notes to Cynthia's Revels, in The Works of Ben Jonson: With Notes Critical and Explanatory, and a Biographical Memoir (1875), edited by William Gifford, Vol. 2, in notes to p. 223, on p. 551: Division, in music, is "the space between the notes of music, or the dividing of the tones."
Unsourced variants:
Music is the silence between the notes.
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them.
Variant: Music is the space between the notes.
A.S. Neill book Summerhill
Source: Summerhill (1960), p. 12
Context: You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist.
“There are notes between notes, you know.”
Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990) American jazz singer
Interview, The Los Angeles Times, 1969
“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.”
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) German late baroque era composer
Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer
Beckmann's lecture 'Drei Briefe an eine Malerin' ('Three letters to a Woman-painter'), New York and Boston, Spring 1948; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 214
1940s
“You don't know how to live until you learn how to die.”
Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie
Source: Tuesdays with Morrie
