Quotes About Music

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it's almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.

There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?

Isn't the point of music to move listeners? Mattison smiled. No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits. And tradition? Real composers make their own.

There's joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you're equal to it.

And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.

IN THE FALL, with his wife in the basement studying Latin, Winston Ma, once Ma Sih Hsuin to everyone who knew him, sits under the crumbling mulberry and, with Verdi's Macbeth blasting out the bedroom window, puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard.

I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly- bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box stepping public.

There's joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you're equal to it.

From the first leaping figure in the strings, Els heard again the problem with music. Even the slightest tune sounded like a story. Melody played on the brain like a weather report, an avowal of faith, gossip, a manifesto. The tale came across, clearer than words. But there was no tale.

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music's threat.

Some were as singable as any human tune. He counted, sensitizing to the calls that played off one another, each a solo against a mass chorus. He lost count after a dozen, unsure where to lump and where to split. Every complex riff was identifiable, although Weber could identify none. Softer, in the middle distance, he heard the shush of cars along Interstate 80 whooshing like sprung balloons.

Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

I'd been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

Muziek dient ertoe ons eraan te herinneren dat we maar heel kort een lichaam hebben.

So, what are you saying? That this was all some kind of vicarious fantasy? The road not taken? In a way. I was . . . I was trying . . . Oh, shit. Her hand rose and her eyes widened. You were composing. In DNA? It did sound ludicrous. But what was music, ever, except pure play?

Musicians speak of bliss, but that's just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control.

Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timber and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated?

In the creature's howling, Els heard the roots of music—the holy society of small discord.

Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.