Quotes About Music

Shortly afterwards, at Cambridge, he noticed a medieval crumhorn hanging on the wall at a friend's digs and began to seek out – and teach himself to play – examples of every type of instrument that time had consigned to oblivion: crumhorns, sackbuts, sorduns, shawms, rebecs, tabors, viols, citole, organetto, racketts and chalumeaux, and all the senior and junior members of the recorder family.

John Renbourn, Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & Ye Grene Knyghte (1968); Shirley Collins, The Power of the True Love Knot (1968); Shirley and Dolly Collins, Anthems in Eden (1969). The Early Music movement as we know it today began in practice

Munrow hated hearing pre-Romantic music sung with operatic vibrato, for example, and pioneered the use of vocalists whose voices didn't wobble.

On 1970's The Lady and the Unicorn he applied his filigree technique to a procession of courtly dance tunes from across medieval Europe, including an old English tune, 'Trotto', and an Italian one, 'Saltarello', given a folk-drone feel by Renbourn's use of an unusual tuning and double-tracked with a sitar.

He continued to dip into pavans, galliards and other sounds of the Middle Ages on records like The Hermit (1976), The Enchanted Garden (1980) and The Nine Maidens (1985).

The unconscious music of the folk has all the marks of fine art; that it is wholly free from the taint of manufacture, the canker of artificiality; that it is transparently pure and truthful, simple and direct in its utterance.

Anthems in Eden

They repeated the trick on Love, Death and the Lady (1970).

Renbourn recorded his great second LP Another Monday in the makeshift studio at Bill Leader's Camden Town flat.

Spanish is so musical that a soap powder commercial in Spanish is more pleasing to the ear than the best free verse in English—the Spanish language is so beautiful that much of its poetry sounds best if the listener does not understand the meaning.

If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, Who are you? would be to hum the Hammerklavier.

Beethoven's music, I think, is often like that. Just when you think you recognize the pattern in his creative acts, he surprises you by a variation. Is that, maybe, why we sometimes feel such music is closer to experienced reality than any theory we can devise?

Beethoven, to cite him one more time, said "Anybody who understands my music will never be unhappy again." That is because his music is the song of the Sixth Circuit, of Gaia, the Life Spirit, becoming conscious of Herself, of Her powers, of Her own capacities for infinite progress.

that called itself the jazz sound, but

Some easy-listening Muzak came onto the phone. I held it away from my ear. If you listened close for long, it gave you cavities.

What's the current hit?" "The Lost Chord" he tells me. "Just a few notes, but it sounds like nothing you'll ever hear.

How well I know what I mean to do When the long dark Autumn evenings come, And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? With the music of all thy voices, dumb In life's November too! I shall be found by the fire, suppose, O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age, While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, And I turn the page, and I turn the page, Not verse now, only prose!

There is to truer truth attainable to man than comes of music.

110And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,     Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives— Followed the Piper for their lives. From street to street he piped advancing

One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art.

One of the many foolish things about the fools who compare writing about music to dancing about architecture is that dancing usually is about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on that space

In the worst of times music is a promise that times are meant to be better. Ultimately, its most important political purpose is to keep us human under fire.

Love is an anchor -- it stops you from drifting away. Love is sticking up for your friends and family, or even your pets. Love is being brave and saying what you feel. Love is making music or playing tennis; it's doing what you want to do. Love is holding on and not letting go.

Twenty-two miles west of the Salton Sea, one hundred sixty-two miles east of Los Angeles, yellow dust rooster-tailed behind them as the Escalade raced across the twilight desert. The sound system boomed so they could hear bad music over the eighty-mile-per-hour wind, what with the windows down to blow out the stink. Dennis