Music Quotes - Page 2

He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Opera purges men of those hesitations and worries which make it difficult for them to acknowledge their importance to themselves. A good performance of an opera that is provides a language for us to speak of ourselves as we have always known we should speak.

Hamish Swanston

No one can any longer write in the fat style of Strauss. That was killed by Stravinsky. He stripped the body of much of its clothes. Music is the craft of building structures with sound and that is what Stravinsky represents.

Vladimir Nabokov

A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.

Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony but organically I am incapable of a tune.

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

Confucius

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra not choreography to the audience.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Ornette Coleman

Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

John Philip Sousa

Mozart is sunshine.

Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle. For it stands halfway between thought and phenomenon between spirit and matter.

Music is another planet.

Alphonse Daudet

Music is the art of thinking with sounds.

Jules Combarieu

Music touches places beyond our touching.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G.K. Chesterton

Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you.

Nothing is better than music.... It has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.

Nadia Boulanger

Rests always sound well.

Arnold Schoenberg

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing did certain persons die before they sing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.

The devil does not stay where music is.

The Sonata is an essentially dramatic art form combining the emotional range in vivid presentation of a full-size stage drama with the terseness of a short story.

Donald Francis Tovey

The sonatas of Mozart are unique they are too easy for children and too difficult for artists.

I have sat through an Italian opera til for sheer pain and inexplicable anguish I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless fruitless barren attention!

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever I could not sing an air to save my life but I have the intensest delight in music and can detect good from bad.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Classic music is th' kind that we keep thinkin'll turn into a tune.

Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better.

Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.

John Cage

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Don't play what's there play what's not there.

From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.

George Bernard Shaw

Generally music feedeth that disposition of the spirits which it findeth.

God tells me how he wants the music played - and you get in his way.

Arturo Toscanini

Handel was a man of the world but Bach was a world of a man.

Arnold Stevenson

He was dying all his life.

I am sure my music has a taste of codfish in it.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.

Edward Appleton

In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.

It is the best of all trades to make songs and the second best to sing them.

Jazz came to America 300 years ago in chains.

Beethoven can write music thank God - but he can do nothing else on earth.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The public doesn't want new music the main thing that it demands of a composer is that he be dead.

Arthur Honegger

Light quirks of music broken and uneven Make the soul dance upon a jig to Heav'n.

The man that hath no music in himself Nor is no moved with concord of sweet sounds Is fit for treasons stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener but in the case of a few composers a very few when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

Benjamin Britten

Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak.

William Congreve

Harpists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

Anonymous

She was an aging singer who had to take every note above 'A' with her eyebrows.

Going to the opera like getting drunk is a sin that carries its own punishment with it and that a very severe one.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings.

I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.

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