Music Quotes - Page 110

Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord.

People who try to create a musical revolution do not have a chance, but those who turn their back to music can sometimes find it.

The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. : the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence.

... We borrowed it all from Coltrane. I started encouraging everybody in the band to listen to John Coltrane - 'Check it out, see what these guys do.' They take one chord, the tonic chord, and just play all over it. 'We can do that too!' I wanted to make our music something really amazing - I wanted it to be jaw-dropping and turn on a dime and do all of those things that I knew music could do, and nobody told us we couldn't do it. I shouldn't say 'I,' though - Jerry Garcia was behind it the whole way.

Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever.

It's the singer not the song that makes the music move along.

I tried to make guitars that were close to what my heroes played. That's the way it's done. My experience is that you have to do it like a musician. You have to learn the language before you can learn to be a novelist.

There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats.

...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

The hills are alive with the sound of music, with songs they have sung for a thousand years.

Great music is in the ear of the beholder.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

A musician must lift up the souls of the listeners, and take them towards space.

Music is my passion - it's what I love and it's in my blood. You can never take me away from my work.

Music is one of the only inanimate things we have left. It can still be mystical, magical and awe-inspiring

Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.

I just do what I do. I like to make music

If I wrote a musical it wouldn't be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.

I'll be forever grateful to this instrument for being the surfboard that I rode the wave of life on

Music is one of those things that becomes a soundtrack to our lives.

Critics don't buy records. They get 'em free.

The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways. ... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.