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

  Michael McKean

  Mistake, Musical, Rock N Roll

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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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• In every art beginners must start with models of those who have practiced the same art before them. And it is not only a matter of looking at the drawings, paintings, musical compositions, and poems that have been and are being created; it is a matter of being drawn into the individual work of art, of realizing that it has been made by a real human being, and trying to discover the secret of its creation.

  Ruth Whitman

  Art, Real, Drawing

  Ruth Whitman (1982). “Becoming a poet: source, process, practice”, Writer

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• The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.

  Susan McClary

  Symphony, Musical, Enlightenment

  "Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality". Book by Susan McClary, 1991.

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• I have found that meditation has helped me with my academic career and has given me insights into musical composition and software design.

  Frederick Lenz

  Careers, Design, Meditation

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• While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Mean, People

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