Musical Quotes - Page 32

• Play the gayest tunes in your books, play them loud and keep on playing them, and never mind if a bullet goes through a trombone, or even a trombonist, now and then.

  Philip Sheridan

  Book, Play, Mind

  20 Copy quote

• Wealth and fame can only be so important in the face of musical magic

  Graham Nash

  Music, Magic, Important

  4 Copy quote

• Michael Bloomfields' musical understanding was broad and deep, and he knew how to turn that understanding into communication .. his influence was phenomenal ... his story is about those kinds of things and about the people he knew and the audiences he thrilled and the times he had...

  Mark Naftalin

  Music, Communication, People

  4 Copy quote

• No one should be allowed to make music as if he were made of wood. One must reproduce the musical text exactly, but not play like a stone.

  Olivier Messiaen

  Play, Stones, Woods

  12 Copy quote

• Man with all his shrewdness is as stupid about understanding by himself the mysteries of God, as an ass is incapable of understanding musical harmony.

  John Calvin

  Stupid, Men, Understanding

  19 Copy quote

• In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Teacher, Art, Book

  4 Copy quote

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

  Iannis Xenakis

  Limits, Construction, Permit

  Iannis Xenakis (1992). “Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition”, p.132, Pendragon Press

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one.

  Iannis Xenakis

  Men, Design, Different

  Introductory notes for Diatope performance, 1978.

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• Opera is a musical scenery, a musical atmosphere in which the characters move and talk.

  Erik Satie

  Moving, Character, Atmosphere

  15 Copy quote

• How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god?  And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment - from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies - how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Eye, Jewels

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I'm now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones.

  Ed McBain

  Winning, Awards, Broadway

  52 Copy quote

• Maybe I've got to admit that what I did here was enough. I can make some more films. Maybe I'll direct a film. Maybe I'll have my musical put on stage. But nothing, really, to be absolutely honest, competes with making a very successful pop band for 10 years of my life.

  Gary Kemp

  Successful, Years, Band

  4 Copy quote

• You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool

  Howard Barker

  Lying, Tragedy, Fool

  4 Copy quote

• Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.

  Bela Bartok

  Mean, Order, Ideas

  62 Copy quote

• The extras are a nice bonus feature, but the main incentive is the musical experience.

  Aaron Neville

  Nice, Bonus, Incentives

  8 Copy quote

• I think theres something strangely musical about noise.

  Trent Reznor

  Music, Thinking, Noise

  14 Copy quote

• This amazing breakthrough full-length revolutionary audio uses a powerful new combination of a subliminal hypnotic induction AND beautiful original music (created with a really cool ancient musical instrument) AND brand-new subliminal clearing commands ALL designed to begin to clear your unconscious blocks of anything and everything in the way of your attracting what you really want – and this incredible one-hour audio does it without any effort at all on your part!

  Joe Vitale

  Beautiful, Powerful, Block

  5 Copy quote

• Good rock 'n' roll is something that makes you feel alive. It's something that's human, and I think that most music today isn't. ... To me good rock 'n' roll also encompasses other things, like Hank Williams and Charlie Mingus and a lot of things that aren't strictly defined as rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life.

  Lester Bangs

  Attitude, Writing, Thinking

  33 Copy quote

• The Steinway piano is such an incomparable instrument. Due to its virtues, I am able to express all my musical feelings.

  Daniel Barenboim

  Piano, Feelings, Able

  9 Copy quote

• Every musical scene has a cycle.

  Paul Epworth

  Scene, Cycles

  4 Copy quote

• I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.

  Boz Scaggs

  Steps, Instinct, Every Step

  4 Copy quote

• ...I got a call from a record company offering me a contract, I did not want to take it because the Lord had pointed me in the direction of spiritual activity...And then it was disclosed to me that I could do both spiritual and musical work. So for five years I executed that contract, and when it was finished, after I made the album Transfiguration, I didn't make another album until twenty-six years later. This new album, Translinear Light, came out of the pleading and constant appealing from my son Ravi Coltrane: 'Ma, please make a CD.' So I eventually agreed.

  Alice Coltrane

  Music, Spiritual, Son

  42 Copy quote

• There was a lot that was tricky about playing with [Thelonious Monk]. It's a musical language where there's really no lyrics. It's something you feel and you're hearing. It's like an ongoing conversation. You really had to listen to this guy. Cause he could play the strangest tempos, and they could be very in-between tempos on some of those compositions. You really had to listen to his arrangements and the way he would play them. On his solos, you'd really have to listen good in there. You'd have to concentrate on what you were doing as well.

  Roy Haynes

  Music, Play, Guy

  7 Copy quote

• Music needs the juxtaposition of opposites to achieve its drama, so harshness and dissonance are simply part of the material a musician can use to create a musical work. All one thing is a bore - all dissonance, or all fatuous consonance. George Winston and Guns and Roses are two sides of the same worthless coin in my esthetic world.

  Chuck Israels

  Music, Drama, Gun

  "Chuck Israels: Evans, Education And Philosophy". Interview with Sean Dietrich, www.allaboutjazz.com. May 27, 2010.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source