Quotes about melody

A collection of quotes on the topic of melody, music, likeness, song.

Quotes about melody

Michael Jackson photo
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart photo

“Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa—Who knows most, knows least.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer

As spoken to Michael Kelly, from Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, of the King's Theatre, and Theatre Royal Drury Lane, including a period of nearly half a century; with Original Anecdotes of many distinguished Personnages, Political, Literary, and Musical (London, Henry Colburn, 1826; digitized 2006), 2nd ed., vol. I (p. 225) http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00439352&id=ph3XEMzGt5YC&pg=RA2-PA225&lpg=RA2-PA225&dq=%22Melody+is+the+essence+of+music%22&hl=en

Zeno of Citium photo
Suman Pokhrel photo

“Once positioned on their(children's) lips,
even the scariest of words
come out as a melodious lisp.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

<span class="plainlinks"> Children http://www.occupypoetry.net/children_1/</span>
From Poetry

B.K.S. Iyengar photo

“Yoga is like music: the rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life/”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 59-60

Sergei Rachmaninoff photo

“It is as a composer that his name will live longest. He was the last of the colourful Russian masters of the late 19th cent[ury], with their characteristic gift for long and broad melodies imbued with a resigned melancholy which is never long absent.”

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) Russian composer, pianist, and conductor

Michael Kennedy The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, 3rd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 516.
Criticism

Giuseppe Verdi photo

“I wish that every young man when he begins to write music would not concern himself with being a melodist, a harmonist, a realist, an idealist or a futurist or any other such devilish pedantic things. Melody and harmony should be simply tools in the hands of the artist, with which he creates music; and if a day comes when people stop talking about the German school, the Italian school, the past, the future, etc., etc., then art will perhaps come into its own.”

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) Italian composer

Io…vorrei che il giovane quando si mette a scrivere, non pensasse mai ad essere né melodista, né realista, né idealista, né avvenirista, né tutti i diavoli che si portino queste pedanterie. La melodia e l’armonia non devono essere che mezzi nella mano dell'artista per fare della Musica, e se verrà un giorno in cui non si parlerà più né di melodia né di armonia né di scuole tedesche, italiane, né di passato né di avvenire ecc. ecc. ecc. allora forse comincierà il regno dell'arte.
Letter to Opprandino Arrivabene, July 14, 1875, cited from Julian Budden Le opere di Verdi (Torino: E.D.T., 1986) vol. 2, p. 60; translation from Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997) p. 126

Charlie Parker photo
José Saramago photo
Han Yong-un photo
Albert Einstein photo
Richard Wagner photo

“It's as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

21 June 1880
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)
Context: Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion's mane and shake at us... It's as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.

Fernando Pessoa photo
Tom Waits photo
John Keats photo

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, are sweeter”

Stanza 2
Poems (1820), Ode on a Grecian Urn
Variant: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
Source: Ode on a Grecian Urn and Other Poems
Context: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Context: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Robert Schumann photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Walt Whitman photo
John Keats photo
John Milton photo

“Without the meed of some melodious tear.”

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 14

Richard Ashcroft photo

“It’s just sex and violence, melody and silence.”

Richard Ashcroft (1971) English singer-songwriter

Bitter Sweet Symphony
Urban Hymns (1997)

Mark Heard photo
Ram Narayan photo

“By and large the present day Indian film music lacks soulful melody, sublime spirit and compelling charm of its lyrical intensity and has nothing Hindustani in it.”

Ram Narayan (1927) classical sarangi player from India

[Sharma, S. D., Sarangi maestro calls present music soulless drudgery, The Tribune, 28 February 2008, http://www.webcitation.org/5pb5rvJkI]

Gioachino Rossini photo

“Simple melody and variety in rhythm.”

Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) Italian composer

Melodia semplice e varietà nel ritmo.
His motto for Italian music, formulated in a letter to Filippo Filippi, August 26, 1868; Luca Somigli Legitimizing the Artist (2003) p. 103.
Often misquoted as "Simple melody – clear rhythm!"

Frank Zappa photo
Art Garfunkel photo
Stefan Zweig photo
Rabindranath Tagore photo
Edgar Allan Poe photo
Ozzy Osbourne photo
Angelus Silesius photo
Mary Robinette Kowal photo
Rabindranath Tagore photo

“When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

37
Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912)

Rabindranath Tagore photo

“First of all, this is Duke's band, and this is Tchaikovsky. Knowing things in their original sources, I abhor taking a concert thing and trying to treat it in a jazz light. In the beginning they have a very nice orchestral usage, but the minute they start going into Johnny Hodges and 4/4, it just doesn't fit. It comes out neither fowl nor fish. The orchestration is enjoyable because, for one reason, they've done a nice job of getting nice, legitimate, straight-sounding things. The melodies are very lovely, but, of course, Duke is the master in this type of thing. But over-all, from a jazz standpoint, I don't appreciate it at all. If I didn't know it was Tchaikovsky, for instance, with the tambourine bit and all, I would feel it was straight out of an MGM Arabian movie. The harmonies he used, particularly some of the background things, interested me more than the melodies, probably because the harmonic part of music interests me more than any. From an orchestrational standpoint I would give this somewhere around 3½ stars; but from a jazz standpoint, none.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing "Arabesque Cookie" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJtWZ771OqA from Ellington's The Nutcracker Suite; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe by Leonard Feather, in Downbeat (October 25, 1962), p. 39

Richard Wagner photo

“Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

21 June 1880
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)
Context: Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion's mane and shake at us... It's as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.

Honoré de Balzac photo

“Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate.”

Part I, Meditation V: Of the Predestined http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Physiology_of_Marriage/Part_1/Med_5.
Physiology of Marriage (1829)
Context: Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

Jodi Picoult photo
Nicholas Sparks photo

“If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.”

Travis Parker, Chapter 13, p. 166
Variant: conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.
Source: 2000s, The Choice (2007)
Context: Finding a woman with a sense of humor had been the one piece of advice his father had given him when he'd first begun to get serious about dating, and he finally understood why his dad had considered it important. If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal,  and yet if  a melody has not  reached its end, it has not reached its goal.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

Haruki Murakami photo

“The song is over. But the melody lingers on.”

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982)

Nicholas Sparks photo
Melissa de la Cruz photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Langston Hughes photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“Every heart has its own melody," he said. "You know mine.”

Variant: Every heart has its own melody.
Source: Clockwork Princess

Shūsaku Endō photo
Brandon Sanderson photo

“we're all freaks sometimes, Melody," he replied. "You're just… well, better at it than most.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Rithmatist

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Mitch Albom photo

“God sings, we hum along, and there are many melodies, but it's all one song - one same, wonderful, human song.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: Have a Little Faith: a True Story

Will Durant photo

“Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand
Unshaken when I fall; that I may know
The shattered fragments of my song will come
At last to finer melody in you;
That I may tell my heart that you begin
Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Source: The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

Mark Heard photo
Max Wertheimer photo

“It has long seemed obvious — and is, in fact, the characteristic tone of European science — that “science” means breaking up complexes into their component elements. Isolate the elements, discover their laws, then reassemble them, and the problem is solved. All wholes are reduced to pieces and piecewise relations between pieces.
The fundamental “formula” of Gestalt theory might be expressed in this way. There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such wholes…
We hear a melody and then, upon hearing it again, memory enables us to recognize it. But what is it that enables us to recognize the melody when it is played in a new key? The sum of the elements is different, yet the melody is the same; indeed, one is often not even aware that a transposition has been made… Is it really true that when I hear a melody I have a sum of individual tones (pieces) which constitute the primary foundation of my experience? Is not perhaps the reverse of this true? What I really have, what I hear of each individual note, what I experience at each place in the melody is apart which is itself determined by the character of the whole,”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

As quoted in: George Klir (2013), Facets of Systems Science, p. 25
"Gestalt Theory," 1924

Charles Mingus photo
John Milton photo
Statius photo

“And now it was your purpose to weep Vesuvius' flames in pious melody and spend your tears on the losses of your native place, what time the Father took the mountain from earth and lifted it to the stars only to plunge it down upon the hapless cities far and wide.”
Jamque et flere pio Vesuvina incendia cantu mens erat et gemitum patriis impendere damnis, cum pater exemptum terris ad sidera montem sustulit et late miseras deiecit in urbes.

iii, line 205
Silvae, Book V

Daniel Levitin photo
Paul Simon photo

“Locked in a struggle for the right combination
Of words in a melody line,
I took a walk along the riverbank of my imagination.
Golden clouds were shuffling the sunshine.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Everything About It Is a Love Song
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)

Howard Gardner photo
Walter Benjamin photo
Park Benjamin, Sr. photo
John Ruysbroeck photo
Van Morrison photo
Peter Greenaway photo

“A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"The Eisenstein Song"
M is for Man, Music, and Mozart

Edward Coote Pinkney photo

“Her every tone is music's own,
Like those of morning birds,
And something more than melody
Dwells ever in her words.”

Edward Coote Pinkney (1802–1828) American poet, lawyer, sailor, professor, and editor

A Health, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Christopher Marlowe photo

“p>Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies.”

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (unknown date), stanzas 1 and 2. Compare: "To shallow rivers, to whose falls / Melodious birds sings madrigals; / There will we make our peds of roses, / And a thousand fragrant posies", William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, act iii. scene i. (Sung by Evans.)

Mark Heard photo

“A lot of times I wonder what Adam would have written songs about. -Appalachian Melody.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Liner Notes

Pete Doherty photo
Christian Wolff photo
Kabir photo

“T were vain to tell thee all I feel,
Or say for thee I'd die.
Ah, well-a-day, the sweetest melody
Could never, never say, one half my love for thee.”

J. Augustine Wade (1796–1845) Irish composer

T were vain to tell, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Wallace Stevens photo
Piero Scaruffi photo
Edmund Clarence Stedman photo
Theodore Watts-Dunton photo

“A sonnet is a wave of melody
From heaving waters of the impassion'd soul.”

Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832–1914) English literary critic and poet

from The Sonnets Voice (A Meterical Lesson by the Seashore).

Burkard Schliessmann photo

“The trends that produced Schumann’s early piano works started out not so much from Weber’s refined brilliance as from Schubert’s more intimate and deeply soul-searching idiom. His creative imagination took him well beyond the harmonic sequences known until his time. He looked at the fugues and canons of earlier composers and discovered in them a Romantic principle. In the interweaving of the voices, the essence of counterpoint found its parallel in the mysterious relationships between the human psyche and exterior phenomena, which Schumann felt impelled to express. Schubert’s broad melodic lyricism has often been contrasted with Schumann’s terse, often quickly repeated motifs, and by comparison Schumann is often erroneously seen as short-winded. Yet it is precisely with these short melodic formulae that he shone his searchlight into the previously unplumbed depths of the human psyche. With them, in a complex canonic web, he wove a dense tissue of sound capable of taking in and reflecting back all the poetical character present. His actual melodies rarely have an arioso form; his harmonic system combines subtle chromatic progressions, suspensions, a rapid alternation of minor and major, and point d’orgue. The shape of Schumann’s scores is characterized by contrapuntal lines, and can at first seem opaque or confused. His music is frequently marked by martial dotted rhythms or dance-like triple time signatures. He loves to veil accented beats of the bar by teasingly intertwining two simultaneous voices in independent motion. This highly inde-pendent instrumental style is perfectly attuned to his own particular compositional idiom. After a period in which the piano had indulged in sensuous beauty of sound and brilliant coloration, in Schumann it again became a tool for conveying poetic monologues in musical terms.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"The Ovidian Elegiac Metre" (translated from Schiller) (1799)

Adrienne von Speyr photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Come, gentle harp, and let me hold
Communion with thy melody,
And be my tale of sorrow told
To thee, my harp, and only thee.”

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

(27th September 1823) Extracts from my Pocket Book. Song
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Thomas Carlyle photo

“Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

John Dryden photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Akira Ifukube photo

“There are two types of composers. Like Stravinsky, some always are aware of the instrument that will be playing a given melody. However, other composers do work out the orchestration only after they have finished composing. I'm like Stravinsky. I always write music with specific instruments in mind.”

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)

Iris DeMent photo
Hayley Jensen photo
Edmund Spenser photo

“Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound.”

Canto 12, stanza 70
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book II

Gerard Manley Hopkins photo
George William Russell photo
Bono photo

“Great ideas and great melodies have a lot in common”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

CNN Larry King Weekend (2002)

Michael Moorcock photo