Music Quotes - Page 112

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

You know as I started as a shy young conductor, I always wanted to cooperate. To build up the musicians. To help them to be better than without a conductor. And sometimes young talented musicians have to be encouraged.

There is an uninformed myth circulating just now that makes dubstep way too important in the musical universe - don't believe the hype.

The Spirit speaks directly to our hearts through music. That's why music has always had such power to move people into positive action.

I don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand ... you've got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different ... the X-factor - so important in rock and roll - which is the feel.

Some people think I'm a mythical genius, others think I'm a junkie madman.

The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.

With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live.

Songs are as sad as the listener.

I just hope I'm remembered as a good blues musician.

There is one thing that freezes a musician more than the deadliest physical cold, and that is the spiritual chill of an unresponsive audience!

We were always going to dump him when we found a decent drummer.

The Beatles were just a band that made it very, very big, that's all.

I try to put the same spirit into that that I put into any other music endeavor I'm involved in.

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

What I like about music is its ability to be convincing, to carry an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities.

The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses.

Music is music; you don't have to put a label on it.

The hardest thing for a musician to learn is how to play WITH people. That's what made the Basie rhythm section.

It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now.

I'm wishing he could see that music lives. Forever. That it's stronger than death. Stronger than time. And that its strength holds you together when nothing else can.

Old music is the same as new music - it's just a different way of delivering it.

But the stuff that I do is more like all the comic roles like in The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus and I just did this Offenbach operetta at the LA Opera. I love it. I just love it. For me, it's like a great mesh of musical theatre and my classical oboe background to be standing on these huge stages with a full orchestra and all the opulence. I'm a complete sucker for the over-the-topness.