Music Quotes and Quotation

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• "I've got the rockin' pneumonia and I need a shot of rhythm and blues."
  • Chuck Berry Roll Over Beethoven

• "Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential."
  • Susan McClary from http://www.ucla.edu/spotlight/archive/html_2001_2002/fac0502_mcclalry.html

• "The composer makes plans, music laughs."
  • Morton Feldman, in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ISBN 1878972316.

• "It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed.... To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition... Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves -- not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with."
  • Morton Feldman, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• "Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm."
  • Edgard Varese, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• "What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector."
  • Jacques Attali, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• "Any attempt to codify musical reality into a kind of imitation grammar (I refer mainly to the efforts associated with the Twelve-Tone System) is a brand of fetishism which shares with Fascism and racism the tendency to reduce live processes to immobile, labeled objects, the tendency to deal with formalities rather than substance. Claude Levi-Strauss describes (though to illustrate a different point) a captain at sea, his ship reduced to a frail raft without sails, who, by enforcing a meticulous protocol on his crew, is able to distract them from nostalgia for a safe harbor and from the desire for a destination."
  • Luciano Berio, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• "One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that -- melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that it was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would always be our own and would be circumscribed, when so many other forces are evidently in action in the final effect."
  • Christian Wolff, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• "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."
  • Gilles Deleuze, from his Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 104.

• "The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value."
  • Lucy Green (1999). Ideology. Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0631212639.

• "We can no longer maintain any distinction between music and discourse about music, between the supposed object of analysis and the terms of analysis."
  • Bruce Horner (1999). Discourse. Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0631212639.

• "Islam presents its principal liturgical text, the Qur'an, through a style of performance that is objectively like the singing of Middle Eastern secular music; yet its religiosity is established in part by its theoretical separation from secular music."
  • Bruno Nettl (1989). Blackfoot Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives. Ohio: The Kent State University Press. ISBN 0873383702.

• "The composer reveals the inmost essence of the world and utters the most profound wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist give disclosures about things which she has no idea of when awake."
  • Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted by Arnold Schoenberg in "The Relationship to the Text", Style and Idea (1912).

• "Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound."
  • Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK 66840.

• "We must ask whether a cross-cultural musical universal is to be found in the music itself (either its structure or function) or the way in which music is made. By 'music-making,' I intend not only actual performance but also how music is heard, understood, even learned."
  • Dane Harwood (1976:522). "Universals in Music: A Perspective from Cognitive Psychology", Ethnomusicology 20, no. 3:521-33

• "All aspects of musical practice may be disengaged, and privileged, in order to give birth to new forms of variation: variations on the relationships between the composer and the performer, between the conductor and the performer, between the performers, between the performer and the listener, variations upon gestures, variations on silence that end in a mute music that is still music because it preserves still something of the musical totality of the tradition...all elements belonging to the total musical fact may be seperated and taken as a strategic variable of musical production. This autonomization serves as true musical experimentation: little by little, the individual variables that make up a total musical fact are brought to light. Any particular music then appears as one that has made a choice among these variables, and that has privileged a certain number of them. Under these conditions, musical analysis would have to begin by recognizing the strategic variables characteristic of a given musical system: musical invention and musical analysis lend each other mutual aid."
  • Molino, Jean (1975). p.42-43. Quoted in:
    • Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1987). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Musicologie générale et sémiologue, 1987). Translated by Carolyn Abbate (1990). ISBN 0691027145.

• "If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits."
  • Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1987). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Musicologie générale et sémiologue, 1987), p.99. Translated by Carolyn Abbate (1990). ISBN 0691027145.

• "Most people die with their music still locked up inside them." ~Benjamin Disraeli

• "Musicians are the architects of heaven." ~Bobby McFerrin

• My mother's idol among pianists was Paderewski. I knew that I would never be a Paderewski, so I searched among the other great pianists of the day, looking for a model, and I found one at last who seemed to be just right for me. He was Vladimir de Pachmann. His style was refined, and so was mine. He was distinguished for the fact that especially in the works of Chopin he struck a great number of wrong notes. It was here that I knew I could rival him, and perhaps even excel him. You see, he struck his wrong notes in extremely rapid passages; I worked at my technique until I was certain that I could strike great numbers of wrong notes in very slow passages. ~, "My Musical Career"

• "The most important thing to me as a songwriter is the breath. The most important thing I could say to somebody is, 'Sometimes I just breathe you in.'" ~Tori Amos

• "The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer." ~Havelock Ellis

• "There are only three kinds of pianists; Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists." — Vladimir Horowitz

• "There are two means of refuge from the misery of life -- music and cats." ~Albert Schweitzer

• "Without music, life would be a mistake." ~Friedrich Nietzsche

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See also

• mass culture.

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