Quotes About Music

Stephen did not intend to go to the concert, not because he disapproved or wanted to distance himself from the notion of such music in a place like west Clare, but because there would be people there.

the more the musicians played the more it struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.

all of them would be gone but be like remembered music or the amassed richness of a lived life.

that elsewhere from which all music takes its origins.

It's like if the music is loud enough I won't be able to listen to my own thoughts.

There's a big tuxedo cat who probably hates the music lying on my lap. He's basically on top of me all day when I'm working.

As for the individual track being the "natural unit of music," that's a fantasy.

The viola and the clarinet made for an interesting pairing: we had to imagine the accompaniment of other instruments, ideally a violin and a cello.

I said that foundational figures of rock can be accommodated within a Beethovenian model of greatness, and the masculinism of 20th-century rock stars finds its contemporary equivalent in the sometimes overt misogyny of hip hop. I also

Joy through suffering: this phrase (extracted from one of Beethoven's letters, where it actually referred to an uncomfortable coach journey) became the central motto of the Beethoven cult [..].

universal features shared by all musics. The very word 'universal' should put us on our guard: as the postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha says, 'universalism…masks ethnocentric norms, values, and interests'.

The basic principle of Western staff notation is that passing time is represented through a series of marks arranged from left to right on the page. Within the five lines of the staff (or stave), notes are arrayed from high to low. So a score is a kind of two-dimensional plot in which the horizontal axis is time and vertical one is pitch;

These things have a huge impact on how music is experienced by listeners; they can make one performance profoundly moving, another dull or ridiculous or unintelligible, even though the notes are the same.

Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.

God, he suddenly understood, was love in its purest form, and in these last months with his children, he had felt His touch as surely as he had heard the music spilling from Ronnie's hands.

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

Music not only saved my life, it gave me a life

I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.

In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

I saw a sick man pick up his instrument and be well

I'm forever near a stereo saying, 'What the fuck is this garbage?' And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer's block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I'm projecting here.

If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!

My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.