Quotes by Composers - Page 15

If you understand or if you don'tIf you believe or if you doubtThere's a universal justiceAnd the eyes of truthAre always watching you
Enigma
There is no such thing as happy music.
Franz Schubert
The true mission of the violin is to imitate the accents of the human voice, a noble mission that has earned for the violin the glory of being called the king of instruments
Charles-Auguste de Beriot
Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.
Franz Liszt
The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.
Frank Zappa
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
Leonard Bernstein
Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in.
Stephen Sondheim
Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa—Who knows most, knows least.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten
The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.
Frank Zappa
A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
Frank Zappa
Don't be afraid to be weakDon't be too proud to be strongJust look into your heart my friendThat will be the return to yourselfThe return to innocenceIf you want, then start to laughIf you must, then start to cryBe yourself don't hideJust believe in destinyDon't care what people sayJust follow your own wayDon't give up and miss the chanceTo return to innocenceThat's not the beginning of the endThat's the return to yourselfThe return to innocenceDon't care what people sayJust follow your own wayDon't give up and miss the chanceto return to innocence
Enigma
Don't be afraid, just play the music.
Charlie Parker
Wish You Were Here So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, Blue skys from pain. Can you tell a green field From a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? And did they get you to trade Your heros for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? Cold comfort for change? And did you exchange A walk on part in the war For a lead role in a cage? How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.
Roger Waters
Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.
Frédéric Chopin
Any good music must be an innovation.
Les Baxter
Don't care what people sayJust follow your own wayDon't give up and use the chanceTo return to innocence.That's not the beginning of the endThat's the return to yourselfThe return to innocence.
Enigma
When you play, never mind who listens to you.
Robert Schumann
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
Igor Stravinsky
This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely,more beautifully,more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.
Ludwig van Beethoven
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
John Cage
If I cannot fly, let me sing.
Stephen Sondheim
When I am ..... completely myself, entirely alone... or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.
Dmitri Shostakovich
Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
Ludwig van Beethoven
All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.
Frank Zappa
The music is not in the notes,but in the silence between.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
Frank Zappa
There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.
Tom Waits
Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.
Robert Fripp
To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
Aaron Copland
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Leopold Stokowski
I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
Tom Waits
Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
Information is not knowledge.Knowledge is not wisdom.Wisdom is not truth.Truth is not beauty.Beauty is not love.Love is not music.Music is THE BEST.
Frank Zappa
Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.
Frank Zappa
Marriage is like the Middle East, isn't it? There's no solution.
Willy Russell
Whatever may be my activity in a given moment (whether I am composing, or whether I am making love . . .), I feel pleasure if there is an obstacle placed in my path but one not greater than my ability to overcome. If circumstances paralyze my energy, I suffer. From this point of view, pleasure and pain accompany every moment of our life, even if we try to disregard them.
Alexander Scriabin
When Mandela passed away, the long walk to freedom will be longer and harder. I wish with my tears that every parent tell about Mandela to their children, shall their children grow up firmly and with faith.
Professor Pezhman Mosleh
Leave the world in better conditions in wich you found it.
Baden Powell
The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
From a pound of iron, that costs little, a thousand watch-springs can be made, whose value becomes prodigious. The pound you have received from the Lord,--use it faithfully.
Robert Schumann
By means of industry and perseverance you will rise higher and higher.
Robert Schumann
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.
Anthony Burgess
He is not a great man. None of us are great men. We are just caught in the wave of history.
Dave Malloy
You will be most readily cured of vanity or presumption by studying the history of music, and by hearing the master pieces which have been produced at different periods.
Robert Schumann
We've reached a point in human history where higher education no longer works. As a result of technology, higher education in its traditional college setting no longer works. It will never be effective or progressive enough to keep up with the growing needs of employers who look to college institutions for their future employees.I can appreciate the good intent the college system set out to achieve. For previous generations, the formula actually worked. Students enrolled into universities that were affordable, they gained marketable skills and they earned good jobs. Since there was a proven track record of success, parents instilled the value of college in their children thinking they would achieve the same success story they did, but unfortunately Wall Street was watching. Wall Street, the federal government and the college system ganged up and skyrocketed the cost of tuition to record highs. This was easy to do because not only did they have posters blanketing high schools showing kids what a loser they would be if they didn't go to college, they also had Mom and Dad at home telling them the same thing.This system - spending 4+ years pursuing a college education when the world is changing at the speed of light - no longer works and it's not fixable. We now have the biggest employer's market in human history, where employers have their pick of the litter, and because of this employees will get paid less and less and benefits will continue to erode.
Michael Price
Fear the howling of the demons in the darkness of your mind. Do not allow them to overshadow the light of your soul. Do not walk blindly into the darkness, or be snatched up by the wicked embrace of the devil.
Michael Daugherty
The human spirit will not invest itself in a compromise.
Robert Fritz
I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
György Ligeti
Mankind will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry, or money.
Ernst Levy
The true artist is not proud, he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun. I would, perhaps, rather come to you and your people, than to many rich folk who display inward poverty.
Ludwig van Beethoven
A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.
Anthony Burgess
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Frédéric Chopin
The notes I can handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes-ah, that is where the art resides.
Artur Schnabel
Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.
Anthony Burgess
Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art.
Robert Schumann
The only thing--I tell you this straight from the heart--that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people--and that music does not have a better reputation...For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!...A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not--but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes--bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart