Music Quotations
Music
From WikiquoteMusic is an art form that involves sounds and silence. Music may be used for artistic or aesthetic, communicative, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The definition of what constitutes music varies according to culture and social context.
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- "The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity."
- Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game.
- "Without music, life would be a mistake."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, in Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols)
- All aspects of musical practice may be disengaged, and privileged, in order to give birth to new forms of variation: variations on the relationships between the composer and the performer, between the conductor and the performer, between the performers, between the performer and the listener, variations upon gestures, variations on silence that end in a mute music that is still music because it preserves still something of the musical totality of the tradition...all elements belonging to the total musical fact may be seperated and taken as a strategic variable of musical production. This autonomization serves as true musical experimentation: little by little, the individual variables that make up a total musical fact are brought to light. Any particular music then appears as one that has made a choice among these variables, and that has privileged a certain number of them. Under these conditions, musical analysis would have to begin by recognizing the strategic variables characteristic of a given musical system: musical invention and musical analysis lend each other mutual aid.
- Jean Molino quoted in Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Abbate, Carolyn (translator) (1987 (original), 1990 (translation)). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. pp. 42–43. ISBN 0691027145.
- I might as well endeavour to perswade [sic], that the Sun is a glorious, and beneficial Planet; as take pains to Illustrate Musick with my imperfect praises; for every reasonable Mans own mind will be its Advocate. Musick, belov'd of Heaven, for it is the business of Angels; Desired on Earth as the most charming Pleasure of Men. The world contains nothing that is good, but what is full of Harmonious Concord, nor nothing that is evil, but is its opposite, as being the ill favour'd production of Discord and Disorder. I dare affirm, those that love not Musick (if there be any such) are Dissenters from Ingenuity, and Rebels to the Monarchy of Reason.
- Salter, Humphrey (1683). The Genteel Companion.
- Being in a band is really great when you're 20. When you're 30, it's kind of 'Spinal Tap,' and when you're 40, it's just pathetic.
- Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, quoted in "Make a Myth, Whip It Good". New York Times. 2001-04-18.
- The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value.
- Green, Lucy (1999). "Ideology". Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. ISBN 0631212639.
- If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits."
- Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Abbate, Carolyn (translator) (1987 (original), 1990 (translation)). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. ISBN 0691027145.
- In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side -— there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.
- Gilles Deleuze, from his Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 104.
- It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed. … To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition... Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves—not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.
- Morton Feldman, quoted in Kostelanetz, Richard (editor) and Joseph Darby (editor). Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music. ISBN 0028645812.
- Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential.
- Susan McClary, quoted in Sullivan, Meg (May 2002). Spotlight: Susan McClary, Musicologist.
- Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.
- Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK 66840.
- One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that—melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that it was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would always be our own and would be circumscribed, when so many other forces are evidently in action in the final effect.
- Christian Wolff, quoted in Kostelanetz, Richard (editor) and Joseph Darby (editor). Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music. ISBN 0028645812.
- Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.
- Edgard Varese, quoted in Kostelanetz, Richard (editor) and Joseph Darby (editor). Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music. ISBN 0028645812.
- The term 'chromatic' is understood by musicians to refer to music which includes tones which are not members of the prevailing scale, and also as a word descriptive of those individually non-diatonic tones.
- Shir-Cliff, J (1965). Chromatic Harmony. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0029286301.
- We can no longer maintain any distinction between music and discourse about music, between the supposed object of analysis and the terms of analysis.
- Horner, Bruce (1999). "Discourse". Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. ISBN 0631212639.
- We must ask whether a cross-cultural musical universal is to be found in the music itself (either its structure or function) or the way in which music is made. By 'music-making,' I intend not only actual performance but also how music is heard, understood, even learned.
- Dane Harwood (1976:522). "Universals in Music: A Perspective from Cognitive Psychology", Ethnomusicology 20, no. 3:521-33
- We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.
- Wynton Marsalis in Smithsonian Magazine, November 2005.
- "Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic far beyond all we do here! And now, bedtime. Off you trot!"
- J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, spoken by Albus Dumbledore.
- Orsino: If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
- Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Act I, sc. i
- "We get nearer to the Lord through music than perhaps through any other thing except prayer."
- J. Reuben Clark, LDS Conference Report, Oct. 1936
- "Music" includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.
- Section 63 (1)(b) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (United Kingdom).
- This section attempts to define music played at raves, in order to give police power to ban them. It was widely ridiculed at the time and since (see, e.g., Marcel Berlins, "Writ Large", The Guardian, February 1, 1994).
- In this day and time you can't even get sick; you are strung-out! Well by God, I'll tell you something, friend: I have never been strung-out in my life, except on music!
- Music is the brandy of the damned.
- George Bernard Shaw, in w:Man and Superman (Act III) (1903)
- The day you open your mind to music, you're halfway to opening your mind to life.
- Pete Townshend of the Who, Pop Chronicles, Show 23 - Smack Dab in the Middle on Route 66. Part 2, interview recorded in London 2.5.1968 [1]
See also
External links
Wikipedia has an article about: Music Look up music in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Category:
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