Music

"Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. I've read that things inanimate have moved, And, as with living souls, have been inform'd, By magic numbers and persuasive sound."

"And when the music goes te-toot, The monkey acts so funny That we all hurry up and scoot To get some monkey-money. M-double-unk for the monkey, M-double-an for the man; M-double unky, hunky monkey, Hunkey monkey-man. Ever since the world began Children danced and children ran When they heard the monkey-man, The m-double-unky man."

"Music is something everyone on Earth can share. Music is meant to heal us, to bring us together, to make us happy."

"Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity."

"Water and air He for the Tenor chose, Earth made the Base, the Treble Flame arose, To th' active Moon a quick brisk stroke he gave, To Saturn's string a touch more soft and grave. The motions strait, and round, and swift, and slow, And short and long, were mixt and woven so, Did in such artful Figures smoothly fall, As made this decent measur'd Dance of all. And this is Musick."

"Music is reflection of self, we just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail."

"The silent organ loudest chants The master's requiem."

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."

"When music, heavenly maid, was young, While yet in early Greece she sung, The Passions oft, to hear her shell, Throng'd around her magic cell."

"If there's one thing the US military enjoys more than keeping our womenfolk in silk stockings during the second world war, it's bombarding its enemies with objectively terrible music. Just last week a report crept out about a group of special psychological operations officers who drive around Afghanistan in an armoured vehicle and blast the locals with Taliban-peeving music like Metallica, Thin Lizzy and the Offspring at earth-shaking volume. The technique is called acoustic bombardment and – along with sensory deprivation and good old-fashioned sexual humiliation – is one of the military's favourite non-lethal coercion techniques. The music itself tends to be exactly the type of aggressively macho fare you'd expect. Metallica are always near the top of the pile, along with Eminem, Dr. Dre, Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA – presumably because officers are experimenting with torture by profound lyrical sarcasm – and nonsense like Fuck Your God by gormless death metal quartet Deicide. David Gray's Babylon used to be on the playlist but it's fallen out of favour, either because Gray expressed his outrage, or because top brass realised that no crime is serious enough to warrant being made to listen to it more than once within a single lifetime. The problem with acoustic bombardment, though, is that it plainly doesn't work. Just because I'd confess to hundreds of atrocities the second that someone started flapping a copy of St Anger in my face, chances are that the Taliban probably wouldn't."

"The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography... between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems. ...it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times of our lives. Your brain on music is all about... connections."

"Merrily sang the monks in Ely When Cnut, King, rowed thereby; Row, my knights, near the land, And hear we these monkes' song."

"I saw the people gather/I heard the music start/The song that they were singing/Is ringing in my heart"

"In notes by distance made more sweet."

"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."

"Once, according to an old legend, there came a messenger from a distant world to give people equality, brotherhood and joy. Long since had people forgotten their songs. They remained in a stupor of hate. The messenger banished darkness and crowdedness, smote infection, and instituted joyful labor. Hatred was stilled, and the sword of the messenger remained on the wall. But all were silent and knew not how to begin singing. Then the messenger assembled the little children, led them into the woods, and said to them: “These are your flowers, your brooks, your trees. No one has followed us. I shall rest—and you fill yourselves with joy.” Thereupon, timidly they ventured into the forest. At last the littlest one came to a meadow and sighted a ray of the sun. Then a yellow oriole sounded its call. The little one followed it, whispering. And soon joyously he sang out, “The sun is ours!” One by one the children gathered upon the meadow, and a new hymn to Light rang out. The messenger said: “Man has again begun to sing. Come is the date!” 162"

"Our sensitivity to changes of pitch ... is underused in musical sound. Western music, in particular, is based on scales that use pitch changes that are at least twenty times bigger than the smallest changes that we could perceive. If we used our discriminatory power to full, we could generate an undulating sea of sound that displayed continuously changing frequency rather like the undersea sonic songs of dolphins and whales."

"Our 'prentice, Tom, may now refuse To wipe his scoundrel master's shoes; For now he's free to sing and play Over the hills and far away."

"The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value."

"I even think that, sentimentally, I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune."

"And hears thy stormy music in the drum!"

"So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of the fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion."

"In hollow murmurs died away."

"Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain— For the reed that grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river."

"Her voice, the music of the spheres, So loud, it deafens mortals' ears; As wise philosophers have thought, And that's the cause we hear it not."

"We would liken music to Aladdin’s lamp — worthless in itself, not so for the spirits which obey its call. We love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings, it can summon with a touch."

"What a change will come over our conceptions of art and music also for the artist of that day there will be many more colors and many more shades of color than those of which we now know, for the knowledge of the higher planes brings as one of its earliest results the power of appreciating all these different hues. The music of that day will be accompanied by color, just as the color studies will be accompanied by harmonious sound; for sound and color are simply two aspects of every ordered motion, so that a magnificent piece played upon the organ will be accompanied by a splendid display of glowing color, and thus another interest will be added to the delight of glorious music, and an additional advantage will in this way be enjoyed by the students of music and art. p. 344"

"And sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument; for there is music wherever there is harmony, order, or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres."

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

"For discords make the sweetest airs."

"God is its author, and not man; he laid The key-note of all harmonies; he planned All perfect combinations, and he made Us so that we could hear and understand."

"The rustle of the leaves in summer's hush When wandering breezes touch them, and the sigh That filters through the forest, or the gush That swells and sinks amid the branches high,— 'Tis all the music of the wind, and we Let fancy float on this æolian breath."

"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."

"Soprano, basso, even the contra-alto Wished him five fathom under the Rialto."

"But music moves us, and we know not why; We feel the tears, but cannot trace their source. Is it the language of some other state, Born of its memory ? For what can wake The soul's strong instinct of another world, Like music?"

"He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, “you are irrelevant”; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, “Listen.” For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."

""Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast," And therefore proper at a sheriff's feast."

"Rugged the breast that music cannot tame."

"If music and sweet poetry agree."

"Urusvati has developed her musical talent beautifully. This proficiency is achieved as the result of much labor in other lives. 42."

"According to the Teachings of Plato, music should not be understood in the narrow sense of music alone, but as participation in all the harmonious arts. In singing, in poetry, in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in speech, and, finally, in all manifestations of sound, musicality is expressed. In Hellas a ceremony to all the Muses was performed. Tragedy, dance, and all rhythmic movement served the harmony of Cosmos. Much is spoken about beauty, but the importance of harmony is little understood. Beauty is an uplifting concept, and each offering to beauty is an offering to the equilibrium of Cosmos. Everyone who expresses music in himself sacrifices, not for himself, but for others, for humanity, for Cosmos. 42."

"Music tells no truths."

"To me, the wonderful thing about music is a love affair between the performer and the composer, and between the composer and his audience. This love affair is a tripartite thing."

"Gayly the troubadour Touched his guitar."

"Hey Jude, don't make it bad Take a sad song and make it better Remember to let her into your heart Then you can start to make it better"

"Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, Expels diseases, softens every pain, Subdues the rage of poison, and the plague."

"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."

"I'm saddest when I sing."

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

"Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again, And all went merry as a marriage bell."