Music

"Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm."

"Of what use is musical knowledge? Here is one idea. Each child spends endless days in curious ways; we call this play. A child stacks and packs all kinds of blocks and boxes, lines them up, and knocks them down. … Clearly, the child is learning about space! ... how on earth does one learn about time? Can one time fit inside another? Can two of them go side by side? In music, we find out!"

"Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential."

"Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?"

"I feel very strongly that all individuals, regardless of age, race, creed or sexual preference, should have the freedom to exercise their rights as human beings to enjoy life, pursue what they want and feel comfortable about who they are. I guess I tend to find the darker sides of life more attractive than the yellows and oranges. I know it's something that I relate to when I listen to music."

"Perfect is not the point. Music isn’t a math problem with one correct answer — it’s a captured moment, feeling translated into sound. Often its charm lies in idiosyncrasies: the raw edge, the human quiver in a voice. Those ‘flaws’ are sometimes what make it compelling."

"It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed. … To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition... Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves—not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with."

"Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound."

"Steven Pinker … advances interesting ideas about understanding human mind in terms of “reverse engineering”: we see that adaptations to our environment have been achieved, and define our task as explaining the means by which these have come about. … But Pinker finds music making—universal in all cultures—to be anomalous. Which means there must be something basically wrong or missing in his view. James could have told him what it is: To miss the joy is to miss all. … The fusion of reality and ideal novelty excites and empowers us, and does so because we are organisms which, to be vital, must celebrate our being."

"[S]o far as music ever had a "meaning" beyond the immediate and exquisite value of the sound-pattern itself, its "meaning" must be simply an emotional attitude. It could never speak directly about the objective world, or "the nature of existence"; but it might create a complex emotional attitude which might be appropriate to some feature of the objective world, or to the universe as a whole."

"One of my friends whom I hold in high esteem admitted to me the other day that when he wants to work nowadays … he has to turn on his radio. The droning of the loudspeaker—so he says—puts him in a favorable frame of mind and ideas pour out. I cannot help but thinking that this is not the act of a true musician. For thought has a rhythm of its own, which must either clash with the rhythm from outside and lose energy, or else submit to the outer impulse in restless slavery."

"It was music, more than anything else, that led the Pythagoreans to believe that the universe is a harmonious place governed by numbers."

"Better to listen to a wise man’s rebuke than to listen to the song of fools."

"Sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane."

"I was ... attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing “simple” music, blamed for deserting “modernism,” accused of renouncing my “true Russian heritage.” People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried “sacrilege”: “The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.” To them all my answer was and is the same: You “respect,” but I love."

"The most complete knowledge of tonal material cannot create a composer any more than the memorizing of Webster's dictionary can produce a dramatist or poet. Music is, or should be, a means of communication, a vehicle for the expression of the inspiration of the composer. Without that inspiration, without the need to communicate, without— in other words— the creative spirit itself, the greatest knowledge will avail nothing."

"Language is its own music."

"Music is the only religion that delivers the goods. All music is good. It fulfills a social function. It's like wallpaper to your lifestyle. It defines what you are."

"We give our souls to our music. We put our lives on the fucking wax and the labels treat us like shit."

"Music is like a mirror in front of you. You're exposing everything, but surely that's better than suppressing. … You have to dig deep and that can be hard for anybody, no matter what profession. I feel that I need to actually push myself to the limit to feel happy with the end result."

"The day you open your mind to music, you're halfway to opening your mind to life."

"If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour."

"Seventy-five percent of everything done throughout your life is the result of habit. Think of it! The way you walk, the way you eat, the clothes you wear, the places you go and...last, but not least, the way you play your accordion."

""Music" includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats."

"If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die."

"Since the accordion has so many attributes that are conducive to chamber music, it is particularly suitable for this medium of expression. In essence, the accordion has all of the prerequisites essential to small ensemble involvement: sustaining power, dynamic sensitivity, articulated response, timbre, and texture variance, and compatibility of sound with string and wind instruments."

"The term 'chromatic' is understood by musicians to refer to music which includes tones which are not members of the prevailing scale, and also as a word descriptive of those individually non-diatonic tones."

"My job is to play music, not politics, and my only obligation is to the people who pay to listen to me. I don't attempt to ram hackneyed, insipid tunes down the public's throat just because they've been artificially hypoed to the so-called 'hit' class. This policy of trying to maintain some vestige of musical integrity has, naturally, earned me enemies, people who think I'm a longhair, impressed with my own ability."

"Music is the birthplace of the word, but only the words that come to light in this house recognise it as their birthplace and as the evocation of the cry."

"The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence."

"Music is the brandy of the damned."

"We get nearer to the Lord through music than perhaps through any other thing except prayer."

"In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return."

"This art is music. It stands quite apart from all the others. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting] which Leibniz took it to be."

"A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time. Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."

"It's not about your music. It's about what makes your music your music. You've got to have a feeling like that. You have to have a reason for your music. Have something besides the technical. Make it for something. Make it for kindness, make it for peace, whatever it is. You know what I mean?"

"Music is a kind of harmonious language."

"Song like a rose should be; Each rhyme a petal sweet; For fragrance, melody, That when her lips repeat The words, her heart may know What secret makes them so. Love, only Love."

"Our music has sprung from the patient, incessant, and progressive penetration into the law of resonance, that is to say, from the successive exploitation of the octave, the fifth and the fourth (ninth to twelfth century), the third (thirteenth to sixteenth century), the seventh (seventeenth and eighteenth century), the major ninth, the augmented fifth, and the perfect eleventh (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) . . . . this evolution . . . . constitutes, at the same time, the only true justification of the musical art."

"Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic far beyond all we do here! And now, bedtime. Off you trot!"

"I might as well endeavour to perswade, that the Sun is a glorious, and beneficial Planet; as take pains to Illustrate Musick with my imperfect praises; for every reasonable Mans own mind will be its Advocate. Musick, belov'd of Heaven, for it is the business of Angels; Desired on Earth as the most charming Pleasure of Men. The world contains nothing that is good, but what is full of Harmonious Concord, nor nothing that is evil, but is its opposite, as being the ill favour'd production of Discord and Disorder. I dare affirm, those that love not Musick (if there be any such) are Dissenters from Ingenuity, and Rebels to the Monarchy of Reason."

"Thank you. If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you'll enjoy the playing more."

"Dick Grayson: What's so important about Chopin?"

"My music springs from the soil of the American midwest. It is music of the plains rather than of the city and reflects, I believe, something of the broad prairies of my native Nebraska.""

"Music—the language of the immortals, disclosed to us as testimony of their existence..."

"Composers have different ways of getting their message out. So, when my teacher told me not to be a snob, this is what he did that put me right in my place. I mean, man, I was such a jazz snob, and he said to me, when I cracked on him about "Sugar, Sugar", he said, "Let me tell you something little brother, any song that makes it into the Top 40 is a great composition." And I said, "Why would you call it a great composition?", Ted. And he said, "Because it speaks to the souls of a million strangers." I was like, "Whoo!" I was like "Pap, smack little kid, now go sit down, and write 'Do-do-do-do' -- punk. Huh huh. Go sit down and write that." I did..."

"Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it."

"Music is essentially useless, as life is."

"Wilt thou have music? hark! Apollo plays And twenty caged nightingales do sing."

"The main thing is not to lose your identity and to continue working ... You have a quartet. That is such joy! You can forget everything else in the world. I'm playing a lot of chamber music these days. Tomorrow we were going to give the first performance of two trios, but because of the mourning, all concerts have been canceled."