Music Quotes - Page 57

I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.

We're a very expensive group; we break a lot of rules. It's unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear .

When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.

Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean it's interesting.

In opera, there is always too much singing.

More than anything, I realize I've been blessed to make great music.

Everyone has their own sound, and if you're heard enough, folks will come to recognize it. Style however, is a different thing. Try to express your own ideas. It's much more difficult to do, but the rewards are there if you're good enough to pull it off.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom.

I don't write music for sissy ears.

Blues musicians don't retire. They drop.

Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. . . . Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.

The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

The world must be filled with unsuccessful musical careers like mine, and it's probably a good thing. We don't need a lot of bad musicians filling the air with unnecessary sounds. Some of the professionals are bad enough.

Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.

I know [canned music] makes chickens lay more eggs and factory workers produce more. But how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?

The conductor is a peculiar person. He turns his back on his friends in the audience, shakes a stick at his players in the orchestra, and then wonders why nobody loves him.

You do not become a master musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true of the life of prayer.

Music is the language of the heart without words.

L.A. to me feels like music industry, and Nashville to me feels like music community.

Music is a great natural high and a great natural escape.

The only form of music is melody, without melody music is not feasible, and music and melody are quite inseparable.

Education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it