“It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.”

“Once you have a basic grasp of the theories underlying music, you can pretty much pick up any instrument you want.”

“Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There is only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.”

“Life's a show and we all play a part
And when the music starts
We open up our hearts”

“I'll very often just start humming my way through a scene. Say, OK the tempo should be about like this, it should pause here, it should pick up here. And very often I'll make up a little melody just to do that. About half of the little melodies in the score for Jonah are those little melodies that I made up just to use to kind of pace a scene and then we got kind of attached to them.”

“Joy can come alive like that, when random pieces of history and rhythm, pause and expectation, melody and lyric, suddenly rearrange themselves into a pattern that leaps up, back against the wall, and catches your heart.”

“The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna,
You'd never be free of her spell.”

“A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.”

“Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.”

“Music starts playing like the end of a sad movie.
It's the kind of ending you don't really wanna see.
'Cause it's tragedy and it'll only bring you down.
Now I don't know what to be without you around.”