Quotes About Music

the concert had energized me in a peculiar and powerful way. It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions.

The rodent of ecstasy sings by my bedside.

Muddy Waters he play in the river Joan Rivers she play in the mud Swami guru play in a big salad bowl Counting lettuce and chewing his cud

but the script he saw written all about him, on the signposts and facades of Alexandria, was musical, all right. It ran complicated scales on the optic nerve. Everywhere, the Arabic alphabet wiggled and popped, enlivening crumbling architecture with outbursts of linguistic jazz, notations from the DNA songbook, energetic markings as primal as grunts and as modern as the abstract electricity of synthesizer feedback.

a free spirit in the oneness of the whole enchilada, seeing the world -- material and immaterial -- for the all-inclusive miracle it is: not a continuous undifferentiated glob of stuff, mind you, but more like a great spiraling web whose interconnected threads are beaded with pulsing blips that as much as anything else resemble notes of music. I'm all too aware of how woo-woo this sounds, but it was as real

then sang a musical version of the Lord's Prayer in a wavering, contralto voice with bluesy quarter-tone inflections. It was strange, haunting, beautiful. Even

On the far wall, just behind the drummer, a hand-painted black-and-white sign read Traditional request $1; Others $2; The Saints $5.

Jimmie Davis beat the certifiably insane incumbent Earl K. Long, had been all about keeping blacks out of the schools. On inauguration day, Davis (composer of the song "You Are My Sunshine") rode his horse right into the legislature

There was a siren-song magic about their music

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

The Plastic People of the Universe played 'Venus in Furs' from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.

I don't know of anything greater than the Appassionata. Amazing, superhuman music. It always makes me feel, perhaps naively, it makes me feel proud of the miracles that human beings can perform. But I can't listen to music often. It affects my nerves, makes me want to say nice stupid things and pat the heads of those people who while living in this vile hell can create such beauty.

The trouble is I don't like the pop music which it's all right to like. You can have a bit of Pink Floyd shoved in between your symphonies and your Dame Janet Baker — that shows a refreshing breadth of taste or at least a refreshing candour.

Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild...It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law.

And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.

They believe they know before the music does what their hands, their feet are to do, but that illusion is the music's secret drive: the control it tricks them into believing is theirs; the anticipation it anticipates.

He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must of been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must of have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since—no matter what business venture he thinks up.

I don't think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get

After Hiroshima, the musicians understood as early as anyone that Truman's bomb changed everything and only scat and bebop could say how.

songs of unreasonable joy.

The disc jockey announced the tunes as though they were made by his family or best friends: King Solomon, Brother Otis, Dinah baby, Ike and Tina girl, Sister Dakota, the Temps.

but the music, which he hoped would coat his nerve ends, only splayed them.

He left me his violin.

Nina Simone helped delay the beginning of the end.