Quotes About Music

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

In memory, everything seems to happen to music.

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

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

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.

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

Jazz came to America 300 years ago in chains.

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

Mozart is sunshine.

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

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 the art of thinking with sounds.

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

Twelve Highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion.

Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!

Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, make the soul dance upon a jig of heaven.

One cannot judge 'Lohengrin' from a first hearing, and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.

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

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.

A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.

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

Music is only sound expressing certain patterns, so to what extent is that sound architecture and to what extent theatre?