Musical Quotes - Page 4

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands and all you can do is scratch it.

The sound of a harpsichord - two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.

Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through Deep Listening

The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.

It is music that welds spiritual and sensual, that can convey ecstasy free of guilt, faith without dogma, love as homage, and a person at home with nature and the infinite.

Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day.

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'.

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.

Nature is an aeolian harp, a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us.

You can't fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that's got nothing to do with it. It's how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.

I don't ever balk at being considered a Motown person, because Motown is the greatest musical event that ever happened in the history of music

In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

I look upon myself as a musical bricklayer with architectural aspirations.

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.

The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry.

Her singing reminds me of a cart coming downhill with the brake on.

Music is part of being human.

I'm obsessed - not just interested, obsessed - with folk music, street music, the parallels between a country's street music and its so-called classical and intellectual music, the way certain scales have travelled right across the globe. All this ethnological and musical interaction fascinates me. Have you heard any trance music? That's the thing.

There are more bad musicians than there is bad music.

The music is in the air. Take as much as you want.

Got my Allman Brothers cassettes stacked up on the dash, got some Jack back in the trunk and a tank full of gas.

If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you're going to have a musical comedy administration.

I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.