Quotes About Music

Judy Nylon, who as a child had sought succour from her parents' escapist 'exotica' albums and regularly drifted off to sleep to the lulling vibraphones of Martin Denny's Quiet Village, recalls a slightly different version of events: 'So it was pouring rain in Leicester Square

Puede que la música proporcionara un espacio abierto para la experimentación, pero las más de las veces lo que encontré fue impostura, poses fotogénicas de tipos de éxito que asumían el papel de rebelde autodestructivo, pero por cada mártir había cien con la suficiente garantía de saber parar a tiempo y no estrellarse.

Too many musicians — singers and instrumentalists — performed it so many times that it's hard not to just go through the motions of playing (or singing) the notes, rather than remembering that you have to turn the notes into real music.

Mozart is just God's way of making the rest of us feel insignificant.

Sorrow and desolation have their songs," wrote Douglass, "as well as joy and peace. Slaves sing more to make themselves happy, than to express their happiness.

Il y a désir et désir. Vers le tablao andalou monte un désir qui est l'honneur de la création. Vers la scène du music-hall parisien, monte un désir qui est de la saloperie.

There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, pinhead eggs that become caterpillars that dissolve into genetic soup from which arise butterflies, that some hearts are dark and others full of light.

we must seize life because we never know how much of it remains for us, that faith is the antidote to despair and that laughter is the music of faith.

It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.

The man told Henry that the only native talent needed to play music well was joy.

What a strange, wondrous thing, music. At last the chattering mind is silenced. No past to regret, to future to worry about, no more frantic knitting of words and thoughts. Only a beautiful, soaring nonsense.

Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

Music is the true breath of life. We eat so we won't starve to death. We sing so we can hear ourselves live.

Music creates order out of chaos; for rythem imposes unianimity upon the divergent, melody imposes contuniuty upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.

The experience of listening to an hour's music you barely know in a dead language you do not understand is a strange falling and rising experience. For minutes at a time you are walking deep into it, you seem to understand. Then, without knowing how or when exactly, you discover you have wandered away, bored or tired from the effort, and now you are nowhere near the music.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.

While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody it had been decided that he would live.

Once you almost said—to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring—you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.

She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

If these are 'talents' – the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation – what kind of a thing is 'talent'? A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what?

The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it's a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected — compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose — maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do.