Musical Composition Quotes

• Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

  Victor Hugo

  Music, Sound And Music, Musical Life

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• Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.

  Confucius

  Music, Wisdom, Art

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• Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

  Pablo Picasso

  Life, Motivational, Music

  "LIFE", Vol. 57, nr. 11, (p. 9), September 11, 1964.

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• Music is the universal language of mankind.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Music, Appreciation, Teacher

  1835 OutreMer. Also attributed to Christopher North (1865-1954).

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• If music be the food of love, play on.

  William Shakespeare

  Love, Inspirational, Romantic

  'Twelfth Night' (1601) act 1, sc. 1, l. 1

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• The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Funny, Music, Joy

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• There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Music, Witty, Powerful

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• Musical composition should bring happiness and joy to people and make them forget their troubles.

  Horace Silver

  People, Joy, Musical

  "Horace Silver, 85, Master of Earthy Jazz, Is Dead" by Peter Keepnews, www.nytimes.com. June 18, 2014.

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• Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.

  Henri Rabaud

  Music, Country, Museums

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• A young man, just beginning the study of musical composition, once went to Mozart and asked him the formula for developing the theme of a symphony. Mozart suggested that a symphony was rather an ambitious project for a beginner: perhaps the young man might better try his hand at something simpler first. "But you were writing symphonies when you were my age." the student protested. "Yes, but I didn't have to ask how."

  James Keller

  Music, Writing, Men

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• As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

  Wynn Bullock

  Photography, Art, Creativity

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• Writers and musicians know well the importance of extensive reading for successful writing or extensive listening for musical composition. Likewise, visual artists... understand that successful artistic creativity depends upon extensive visual exposure.

  Paul Laseau

  Reading, Writing, Creativity

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• When I create I don't think in technical or mathematical terms until the idea is formulated Musical composition is formulated in improvisation. Once a pianist like myself sits down and begins to play and start thinking about what I am writing all of a sudden a little tune will emerge, a little spot light and I'll go, "That's interesting."

  Aaron Zigman

  Writing, Thinking, Light

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• I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

  Henri Matisse

  Color, Musical, Way

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1973). “Matisse on art”

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• Movies are pieces of film stuck together in a certain rhythm, an absolute beat, like a musical composition. The rhythm you create affects the audience.

  John Carpenter

  Musical, Together, Pieces

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

  Paul Klee

  Life, Art, Expression

  Paul Klee (2012). “Paul Klee”, p.61, Parkstone International

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• For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"--to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances.

  Daniel Levitin

  Moving, Successful, Artist

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• It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Talking, Piano

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• There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm.

  Alton Tobey

  Color, Musical, Painting

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• Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and - to perfect it.

  Max Beckmann

  Jobs, Heart, Order

  "Letters of the great artists - from Blake to Pollock". Book by Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, 1963.

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• Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

  Umberto Eco

  Sadness, Fate, Destiny

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• And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

  Karlheinz Stockhausen

  Musical, Important, Transformation

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• The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

  Ada Lovelace

  Expression, Numbers, Musical

  "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage". Book by L.F. Menabrea. Scientific Memoirs (Richard Taylor): 694, 1842.

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• For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.

  George Steiner

  Art, Writing, Musical

  George Steiner (1991). “Real Presences”, p.224, University of Chicago Press

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• Jazz, isn't that just a series of mistakes diguised as musical composition?

  Michael McKean

  Mistake, Musical, Rock N Roll

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