Quotes About Music

One good song with a message can bring a point more deeply to more people than a thousand rallies.

And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.

Music is not just the black dots on the white paper -- it's what happens when those black dots go into your heart, and come out again.

The fashion look of teens and twentysomethings -once so cutting edge- is now, like most of the music played on the radio, a matter of routine. Safe, tired, everywhere.

Carlo: Give you a sense of well-being. Do you think young children, young teenagers, actually, should be kept away from music like that? Ramirez: No, because I believe that a person that ... a person that is destined or inclined to be evil will be evil with or without music. Music I don't believe has a part in anything. Carlo: Even young, impressionable minds? Ramirez: Yes, yes ... because I believe that it is the environment that will determine who a child will grow up to be.

It's always seemed odd to me that nonfiction is defined, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not fiction. But then again, it is also not poetry, or technical writing or libretto. It's like defining classical music as nonjazz.

En el mundo de la pintura, todos esperaban innovaciones e ideas nuevas, pero, en el mundo de la música, con un entorno mucho más conservador, no había espacio para las nuevas ideas. El mundo de la música seguía obsesionado por una «música moderna» que tenía más de cincuenta años. Aquella reflexión supuso para mí un momento de liberación.

The point was that the world of music—its language, beauty, and mystery—was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The "out there" stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.

Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The "out there" stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.

Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn't have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.

The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.

As a Juilliard student I would write music by day and by night hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis and Art Blakey at the Café Bohemia, or Thelonious Monk trading sets with the young Ornette Coleman, who was just up from Louisiana playing his white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot at St. Marks Place and the Bowery. Years later, I got to know Ornette.

the Chicago Symphony was in a class by itself. Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny—you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing. But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy.

Truth be told, I was far from horrified by the prospect of "traveling from city to city and living in hotels." I was rather looking forward eagerly to that—a life filled with music and travel—and completely thrilled with the whole idea.

First to strike a visitor was the raucous music: strident jerking jazz, faster than anything that had gone before; it was the sound of speed. Yet more striking were the dancers: thin young women, diaphanous short skirts showing their legs, their heads crowned with iridescent feathers twitching in time to the music. To those used to Strauss waltzes, these 'flappers' seemed to be suffering from some new nervous disorder.

he sees that it does not accord with the practices of the sage-kings of old and does not promote the benefit of the people in the world today. And so our teacher Mozi says, "Musical performances are wrong!

If they employ men to make music, then these men must abandon their work of ploughing, planting, and cultivation.

Music lives within thy lips Like a nightingale in roses.

I don't much like opera, either. Especially Wagner. There's something about Wagner that's just too piss-German, too fucking Bavarian for a Prussian like me. I like my music to be every bit as vulgar as I am myself. I like a bit of innuendo and stocking-top when a woman's singing a song.

Loud songs do not a patriot make.

Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(Which was rather late for me)—Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles' first LP.

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

fatal stabbing of a young black spectator while Mick Jagger vainly appealed to the crowd to "cool out" and love one another. Good-bye Sixties; welcome to the future.

Late one night, as he walked back alone from a Kasuals gig, a truck screeched to a halt beside him and a group of drunken white youths jumped out, screaming racial abuse. Jimmy took off across a cornfield, easily outdistanced his would-be attackers and then, rather like Cary Grant in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, lay doggo on top of Betty-Jean, until they gave up and drove away.