Interview, The Los Angeles Times, 1969
“The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.”
“Music is the space between the notes.”
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.
The Kate Bush Story (2014)
Context: You can hear one note of a Kate Bush song, or one note of her voice even, and know immediately what it is. And that is the biggest feat of any artist, especially when you consider, you know, all the roads that she's gone down.
[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, 114, 0-679-74275-1]
Elsewhere
“Notes don't make music until you learn to insert silence between them.”
Studio http://www.benfolds.com/studio
Song lyrics, BenFolds.com
“A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.”
BBC Interview with Cecil Day Lewis (13 September 1957); transcripts published in "It Takes a Hero to Make a Poem" in the Claremont Quarterly (Spring 1958) http://www.frostfriends.org/FFL/Periodicals/Interview-lewis.html
1950s
Source: The Name of the Wind
“I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.”
