Music Quotes - Page 44

Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'.

Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.

It's the group sound that's important, even when you're playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.

It's a great thing about being a musician; you don't stop until the day you die, you can improve. So it's a wonderful thing to do.

No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.

Music can always be a life-changing experience, for musicians and fans, or at least life-affecting, but it depends on to what degree.

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

I love music. It's freedom, a way to deal with pent-up frustration.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

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.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line

People who talk well but do nothing are like musical intruments; the sound is all they have to offer.

Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.

When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level

All music is beautiful.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Everything that happens helps you grow, even if its hard to see right now.

My music is not lovely.

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes", And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be "No."

You've got certain guys that just want to be famous and then you've got the real musicians that just love playing music.

I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.

Listen deeper than the music before you put it in the box.

Too many musicians rush through everything with too many notes. I need time to take the picture. A ballad should be a ballad. It's important to understand what the song is saying, and learn how to tell the story. It takes time. I can't rush it. I really can't rush it.