Quotes About Music

song; what pissed them off is that white people liked it. When we played it there were thousands of white kids at our shows, wilding out in pits, shouting the words with fists in the air.

Long before we ever heard about hip-hop in L.A., I was writing rhymes. It

So it's one blow after the next, three of our band members gone. Three young dudes—all unexpected, all in a short period of time.

had five straight gold albums—about a ten-year plateau—and then my sales just dropped off a steep fucking cliff. From being able to ship half a million records, suddenly I was only shipping

150,000. When I first realized it was happening, I took it personally, but that feeling lasted maybe two months. I noticed that it was the same story for Public Enemy, EPMD, Eric B. & Rakim. All these artists I respected were no longer selling like they used to. I said, "Okay, there's a paradigm shift going on.

got a full-time job in there paying me about thirty cents an hour. When I wasn't working in the laundry, I started writing and recording songs. This dude I met had a little cassette recorder, and over the years I recorded something like sixty songs. I studied all the rappers I loved and really

I'd been a wedding singer through college, but after a few years of doing my best renditions of jazz standards to clinking glasses and the sound of forks on salad, I thought, 'Oh God, if this is all I do, I'll never be able to live with myself.'

What do I sing, and what does my tambourine sing?

Qué es lo que canto y qué es lo que mi tambor canta?

I think that all the years of exposure to amps and electricity has altered my body chemistry.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor we do not remember him in it.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

Recordings of Georgian folk polyphonic songs makes a great musical impression. They are recorded in a tradition of active reproduction of Georgian folk music the origin of which begins from ancient time. It is a wonderful finding and can give to the performance much more than all the modem music can... Yodel or "Krimanchuli" as it is called in Georgia is the best song which I have ever heard. ["America" magazine, No 23 1967]

Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music. [Los Angeles Times. 26.02.1990]

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.