Music Quotes
1. Music is: "...important to mankind for as many reasons as there are people on earth. Its language touches anyone who is musical. It is a history of the most notable aspirations of the human soul." -Margaret Hillis.
2. Music offers more: "Music is spiritual. The music business is not." --Van Morrison (b. 1945), Irish rock musician.
3. "Rhythm and Harmony find their way into the inmost soul and take the strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace." Strunck, p8
4. Music is in process: "A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become." W. H. Auden (1907-73), Anglo-American poet.
5. Music breaks monotony: "Today, music heralds . . . the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore." Jacques Attali (b. 1943), Algerian-born French economist, writer. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, ch. 1 (1977).
6. Good music dances! Ezra Pound offers: "...music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement." Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet, critic.
7. Music is dreamy: "Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason. --Albert Camus (1913-60), French-Algerian philosopher, author. "Essay on Music."
8. Music identifies generations: "Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes." --Bill Cosby (b. 1937), U.S. comedian, actor.
9. Music is a universal language: "Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress." --Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
10. Music IS! "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." -Walter Pater (1839-94), English essayist, critic.
11. Music is personal expression: "It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music." --Eric Hoffer (1902-83), U.S. philosopher.
12. Music is moody: "Music was invented to confirm human loneliness." --Lawrence Durrell (1912-90), British author.
13. Music is a sign of trustworthiness:
"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted." --William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
14. Defeat artistic ignorance! "Americans...are almost ignorant of the art of music, one of the most elevating, innocent and refining of human tastes, whose influence on the habits and morals of a people is of the most beneficial tendency." --James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), U.S. novelist.
15. Music is multicultural: "The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. . . . The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud." --George Steiner (b. 1929), French-born U.S. critic, novelist.
16. You can fight elevator music: "People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet." --Witold Lutoslawski (b. 1913), Polish composer.
17. Music is powerful: "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak." --William Congreve (1670-1729), English dramatist.
18. Music is personal: "Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn [we may add voice, here]. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art." --Charlie Parker (1920-55), Jazz musician.
19. Music is a Humanity: "Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind." Lewis Thomas (b. 1913), U.S. physician, educator.
20. Music is a Fine Art: "Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something." Frank Zappa (b. 1940), U.S. rock musician.
21. Fight cultural ennui: "The manner in which Americans "consume" music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie-it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made." --Frank Zappa (b. 1940), U.S. rock musician.
22. Music is a free spirit: "There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect." --Thomas Mann (1875-1955), German author, critic.
23. Music is within you: "Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me. --Jean Genet (1910-86), French playwright, novelist.
24. The music is "within" you: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." John Keats (1795-1821), English poet.
25. Fight the status quo! "If I could believe the Quakers banned music because it was so damn bad, I should view them with approval." --Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet, critic.
26. Music is: "...the only sensual pleasure without vice." --Samuel Johnson (1709-84), English author.
27. Music is: "...cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, & everlasting beauty of monotony." --Benjamin Britten (1913-76), British composer.
28. Music changes things: "They said, "You have a blue guitar,-- You do not play things as they are." -- The man replied, "Things as they are -- Are changed upon a blue guitar." --Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet.
29. Fight "pop culture:" "A lot of pop music is about stealing pocket money from children." --Ian Anderson (b. 1947), British rock musician.
30. Self-expression: "Life has been "your" art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnet." Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author.
31. Together, we fight bad-music! "There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening." --Pat Metheny (b. '54), U.S. jazz guitarist.
32. Music is informative! "Let us describe the education of our men. . . . What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind." --Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.), Greek philosopher.
33. Music brightens your day! "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." --Frank Zappa (b. 1940).
34. "It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played." --Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Austrian philosopher.
35. Music makes you unhappy: "What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music." --Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes
36. Music disrupts! "There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music." --John Keats (1795-1821), English poet.
37. Music is immortal! "Prometheus bringing fire from heaven to earth, will always be Orpheus enthralling nature with his music. Not until humanity itself dies will art die." --Ernst Fischer (1899-1972)
38. Music is dangerous! "In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals." --Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher.
39. Music is American--Walt Whitman describes the American people thusly: "...they delight in their music."
40. "There is the Music of Heaven in all things and we have forgotten how to hear it until we sing." -Hildegard of Bingen (medieval mystic and abyss).
41. Music speaks for itself! "Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie." --John Milton
42. "Love is friendship set to music." --E. Joseph Crossmann
43. Music is a foreign language: "Universal language should be taught to (and "learned by") everyone--We call it Music." --John Walters
44. The world needs prayer, and: "He who sings prays twice." --Attributed to St. Augustine
45. Music is a high calling! "I place music next to theology and give it the highest praise." --Martin Luther
46. Music is Forever: "The minor leagues for Heavenly Choirs are here on earth--Join One!" --J. Walters
47. Music stays with you: "The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more." --W. Wordsworth (from: The Solitary Reaper)
48. It gives the world more music! "As long as we live, there is never enough singing." --Martin Luther in a lecture on Isaiah 6:13 (1527)
49. Get one-up on Elvis! "I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to." --Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
50. Martin Luther says so: "I would certainly like to praise music with all my heart as the excellent gift of God which it is and to commend it to everyone. But I am so overwhelmed by the diversity and magnitude of its virtues and benefits that...as much as I want to commend it, my praise is bound to be wanting and inadequate...For whenever you wish to comfort the sad, to terrify the happy, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate, or to appease those full of hate...what more effective means than music could you find?" --Martin Luther (from a preface to Georg Rhau's Symphoniae iucundae, 1538)
51. Music is scientific! "Engineering is the Mathematics of the Mind, Music is the Mathematics of the Soul" -anonymous
52. Music gives goosebumps! "The fascinating chill that music leaves..." --Emily Dickinson
53. Music is influential! "Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and it is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement." --Napoleon Bonaparte
54. Do it for YOU! "Work is what you do for others . . . Art is what you do for yourself." -- Stephen Sondheim
55. Improve the environment: "Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable." --Samuel Johnson
56. Help Uncle Sam: "Military justice is to justice what military music is to music." --Groucho Marx (surely choirs can supercede than this!)
57. Beethoven (not the dog) recommends it: "...music is higher revelation than all...wisdom and philosophy." -- Ludwig van Beethoven (1810)
