Quotes About Music

Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.

I always try to leave room for improvisation and responsive musicianship. That's what makes the music feel alive every night and makes playing fun every time. You're not just doing the same thing you performed the night before, even if it's the same song.

I'm really just trying to do things that I enjoy. I'm trying to play music that I like to play and like to listen to. I just have to think if I like those different kinds of music, there are other people who aren't so different from me.

I'm a very lucky man. I get to do the thing I want most in life, write songs and sing them for people, and ride bikes. I love my family. I love my home. I get to work with people I've admired my whole life. It's a pretty good life.

I joke that I've never been burdened by having an actual hit. There's something to that. My records have sold enough to make the record company money to help me keep my job. But I've never had anything so firmly ingrained in the mind of the public that I'm expected to repeat it.

Beyond hoping that someone will like one of my songs, I don't think about how a song will be received. I just hope that, when somebody hears one of my songs, they'll want to hear it again.

My music has always been sort of in-between categories. Sometimes record stores -- back when there were record stores -- they'd put my records in the country music section, but other record stores would put my records in the pop or even the rock section. As long as it's in the store somewhere, I'm OK with it.

When someone tells me what he or she was doing the first time they heard a song of mine, then I've done a good job. If my song becomes about your life, then I'm successful.

Then I see you, Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur, With a basket of roses on your arm. You are cool, like silver, And you smile. I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes.

The pennoned reeds, that, as the west-wind blew, Gleamed and sighed plaintively, as if they knew What music slept enchanted in each stem, Till Pan should choose some happy one of them, And with wise lips enlife it through and through.

Love called, and I could not linger, But sought the forbidden tryst, As music follows the finger Of the dreaming lutanist.

The music never leaves. Once you have it, you can't lose it.

Hugh had been her obsession. When he was away, she had assumed he was with other women. It drove her crazy, dominated her thoughts. She had tried to concentrate on her daughters, but her own insecurity was much too huge. When Skye would beg for a story or Clea would need help with her music lessons, Augusta would tell them to ask Caroline. So Augusta could be with Hugh.

Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing.

In high school, I was Mr. Choir Boy. I had solos, I was helping out the tenors with their parts and our choir teacher would ask me what songs we should do.

Antes de conocerlo se había sentido muy sola. Le conté que por las mañanas yo decía el nombre de Max incluso antes de abrir los ojos. Ella me dijo que su vida había sido como escuchar un disco horrible una y otra vez, cada día, y en un instante le habían dado vuelta al disco, y sonaba música. Max la oyó y me sonrió. Ves, amor, ahora estamos en la cara B. (Del cuento Hasta la vista)

A composition can include an element of improvisation as one of its layers. But jazz improvisation is based on specific codes, which don't allow the possibility to construct multiple layers, to put together different words, to have different rhetorical gestures intact.

Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.

Audiences must be educated, too -- in a very gentle way, of course, but the relation of the audience to music is very mobile, very different. Certainly a Chicago audience can react differently from a Paris audience or from a Rome audience.

Our relation to music must remain open, in a way. This is the privilege of music, not to let itself be formalized, to be locked in a certain procedure, in a certain way.

Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.

Some composers are just interested in music as form. I am much more interested in the formational aspect, in music as a process.

Music, as you know, is an incredibly complex process, including conceiving, writing, studying, organizing, listening. The fabric of music has its roots everywhere. That's why it is so beautiful.