Music Quotes - Page 26

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

Imitate, assimilate, and innovate.

I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative switftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

Music is a fantastic peacekeeper of the world, it is integral to harmony, and it is a required fundamental of human emotion.

We are living in a cultural dark age of musical pollution. You put the radio on, and five minutes later you need an aspirin.

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.

I can't read sheet music, I have to just listen to it, and then just go for it.

There are notes between notes, you know.

Music fills the infinite between two souls. This has been muffled by the mist of our daily habits.

The good thing about working alone is I get a lot done and I can experiment more. The bad thing is I miss out on the gregarious, social way that most musicians work.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

Speaking of River City in The Music Man & his home town, Mason City, Iowa: I didn't have to make up anything. I simply remembered Mason City as closely as I could.

Reggae music isn't Jewish, but a lot of the ideas are.

Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.

I have a weird life because I live on songwriting royalties, which are a strange income. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn't.

I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.

I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying 'I don't want to make a cemetery of your compositions.'

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Which of the two powers, Love or Music, can elevate man to the sublimest heights? ... It is a problem, and yet it seems to me that this is the answer: 'Love can give no idea of music; music can give an idea of love.' ... Why separate them? They are two wings of the soul.

I’ve learned what ‘classical’ means. It means something that sings and dances through sheer joy of existence.

The typical rock fan is not smart enough to know when he is being dumped on.

The thing that influenced me most was the way Tommy played his trombone. It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin-not sounding like them, but "playing" the voice like those instrumentalists.

My old man was a musician - that's what he did for a living. And like most fathers, occasionally he'd let me visit where he worked. So I started going to his recording studio, and I really dug it.

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from the Beverly Hillbillies.

Silence is more musical than any song.