Quotes about music-making

A collection of quotes on the topic of music, making, music-making, play.

Quotes about music-making

“Music makes things hurt less.”

Tyler Joseph (1988) American singer-songwriter and record producer

“Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“Only sick music makes money today.”

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

“I firmly believe that the primary role of the tabla is saath-sangat. Which is why I enjoy being on stage with Shivji (Pt Shivkumar Sharma), Amjadbhai (Amjad Ali Khan) or Birju Maharaj. I look forward to these concerts. Unlike a solo concert where I am my own boss, here I have to strike a dialogue in the music-making process. This enriches and makes me a better musician and tabla player.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I've never wanted to fit in Abbaji's shoes: Ustad Zakir Hussain

“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.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Choice

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.

Relationship, Music, Laughter, Time

“For years I have encouraged my patients and students to play musical instruments. I believe that it is essential for their ultimate health to be able to express themselves musically. Inside each of us is the deep desire to open our hearts and sing out with love. I find that when they allow music-making to enter into their lives, there is a beautiful change. There is an opening of the heart.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: The Life Energy in Music, Vol. 1 (1981), p. 105

Love, Health, Beauty, Music

“Let music make less terrible
The silence of the dead;
I care not, so my spirit last
Long after life has fled.”

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

Source: The Venetian Bracelet (1829), Lines of Life

Life, Music, Silence, Dead

“Edwin Fischer was, on the concert platform, a short, leonine, resilient figure, whose every fiber seemed to vibrate with elemental musical power. Wildness and gentleness were never far from each other in his piano-playing, and demonic outbursts would magically give way to inner peace. It was as little trouble to him (as Alfred Polgar once said of an actor) to lose himself as to find himself.
His playing of slow movements was full of an unselfconsciousness beside which the music-making of others, famous names included, seemed academic or insincere. With Fischer, one was in more immediate contact with the music: there was no curtain before the soul when he communicated with the audience. One other musician, Furtwangler, conveyed to the same degree this sensation of music not being played, but rather happening by itself.”

Alfred Brendel (1931) Austrian pianist, poet, and author

As cited in: Ruth Hanna Sachs, ‎D. E. Heap, ‎Joyce Light (2005). White Rose History, Volume II (Academic Version). p. 366

Peace, Music, Way, Soul

“Normally, misprints are either easily corrected or else so trivial that it makes no difference whether we play the correct or the faulty version. … Nevertheless, on rare occasions, a misprint or slip of the pen may challenge our view of the musical language. These extreme cases may help us understand a little more about the way music acquires meaning, or what it means to say that the music makes sense.”

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

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Music, Way, Understanding, Sense

“I have a bag full of words, and when one of us comes up with a good piece of music, I look in the bag to see if anything there will fit. If nothing does, I sit down and try to put down on paper what the music makes me feel; very rarely will a piece of writing inspire a piece of music.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

CANOE 1996

“I wrote and recorded music for many years, thinking I was only pleasing myself. The fact that so many people have appreciated the music, makes my life incredibly rewarding and full.”

Happy Rhodes (1965) American singer-songwriter

Message at the Happy Rhodes fan Guestbook http://www.e-guestbooks.com/cgi-bin/e-guestbooks/guestbook.cgi?action=view&user=Equipoise

Life, People, Music, Thinking

“If music is haraam then why has it reached such heights? Why does music make me to soar towards heaven? The religion of music is one; all other are different. I tell the Mullas that this is the only haqeeqat (reality). This is my world. My Namaaz is the seven ‘sudh’ [pure] and five ‘komal’ [soft] surs”

Bismillah Khan (1916–2006) Indian musician

His reply to the hardliner Shia mullas who wanted to ban music.
Quote, Power Profiles

World, Religion, Music, Reality

“We're really not very good about putting music in a social and political context, particularly classical music. It's all sort of above everything. But in South Africa, everything is politicised. You play a piece of classical music out there and you are making a real cultural statement. Or you play with a marimba band and you are saying something else. I think that's the way things should be. The way people write about music makes it seem completely devoid of social context. And audiences drift away as a result.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Financial Times, 11/11/1999
On Classical Music

People, Music, Way, Thinking

“She gets rock n roll, a rock n roll station
And a rock n roll dream.
She's making movies on location.
She don't know what it means.
But the music make her wanna be the story.
And the story was whatever was the song, what it was.
Rollergirl don't worry.
D. J. plays the movies all night long.”

Mark Knopfler (1949) English guitarist

Skateaway
Song lyrics, Making Movies (1980)

Dreams, Music, Night

“Collective music making… may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts…”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Music, Feeling, Exercises

“Art and music make manifest, by bringing into conscious awareness, that which has previously been felt only tentatively and internally. Art, in its widest sense, is a form of play that lies at the origin of all making, of language, and of the mind's awareness of its place within the world. Art, in all its forms, makes manifest the spiritual dimension of the cosmos, and expresses our relationship to the natural world. This may have been the cause of that natural light which first illuminated the preconscious minds of early hominids.”

F. David Peat (1938–2017) British physicist

Pathways of Chance (2007).

World, Art, Music, Nature

“When we were first playing, even though it was derivative, playing music was the best, there was nothing better. And then by the second album (Freak Show) we were like, playing music makes me angry, and by the third album (Neon Ballroom) I was like, I need to play music cos life sucks. And now all of a sudden there's this really youthful enthusiasm in the band, everyone around us, there's this real positivity and everyone's vibing off the music.”

Daniel Johns (1979) Australian musician

Kerrang! magazine, April 2002
Interviews

Life, Youth, Music

“Hark! My ears are catching corncrake’s clicking,
Silver moonlight shines on cobhead corn;
Summer evening’s blessing me, enriching,
Valley’s wreaths of smoky slash and burn.
Neither joying I, nor grieve I, mournful;
But for forest’s darkness am I yearnful,
Rose-gilt clouds the day’s protracted ending,
Windy sleeping hill o’er all extending,
Fragrant twinflower, shortening, lingering shade;
These the things from which my heart-song’s made.

Lady June-July, for you I’m singing,
Great the silence of my ardent heart,
Merry music make, for faith is mounting,
Verdant wreath of oak eternal start.
Foolish errands now I’ll make no longer,
Fortune blessèd hands will grasp the stronger;
Rippled pool of circles now decreasing;
Time has ceased and weathervane is sleeping;
Stretches road at twilit end of day,
Bound for home unknown, I take its way.”

Eino Leino (1878–1926) Finnish poet and journalist

Faith, Music, Way, Home

“No other type of music-making contradicts itself through its recording like improvisation does.”

Mattin (1977) Spanish musician

Page 168.
"Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property" (October 2008)

“My motivation is that inner driving force within me to share my music with the world. I want to get my music out there so I can inspire people just as I have been inspired through music. Music makes you feel; whether it’s happy, sad, or a million different emotions which come to mind, music can invoke those feelings. That’s inspiration to me. ”

Мэдисон Роуз

People, World, Sadness, Music

“Rock music makes me alive, it makes me awake, so that tiredness can touch me and make me say – It's enough, I have earned much popularity.”

Ayub Bachchu (1962–2018) Musician, singer, songwriter

Bachchu in an interview with Shomoy TV.

Music, Making love

“Of all the arts, music makes the most direct appeal to the emotions and to those shadowy, but real portions of our being called the imagination and the soul. Emotion is as indispensible to music as love to religion.”

Walter Raymond Spalding (1865–1962) American music pedagogue and author

Page 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=pQARAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA3. <br class="br">Music: An Art and a Language (1920), Preliminary Considerations (Ch. I)

Soul, Imagination, Religion, Art