A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace. CONFUCIUS

Wednesday 25 June 2008

If Music Be The Food Of Love, Play On

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below. -- Joseph Addison

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. -- Maya Angelou

Music is either good or bad, and it's got to be learned. You got to have balance. -- Louis Armstrong

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. -- Berthold Auerbach

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul. -- Johann Sebastian Bach

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. -- Ludwig van Beethoven

Music - The one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend. -- Ludwig van Beethoven

Music can change the world. -- Ludwig Van Beethoven

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. -- Leonard Bernstein

Music has to breathe and sweat. You have to play it live. -- James Brown

Music is well said to be the speech of angels. -- Thomas Carlyle

All music comes from God. -- Johnny Cash

If you learn music, you'll learn most all there is to know. -- Edgar Cayce

Music is nothing separate from me. It is me... You'd have to remove the music surgically. -- Ray Charles

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is. -- Miles Davis

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. -- George Eliot

You are the music while the music lasts. -- T. S. Eliot

We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it. -- Jerry Garcia

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. -- Kahlil Gibran

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had and never will have. -- Edgar Watson Howe

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossile to be silent. -- Victor Hugo

The history of a people is found in its songs. -- George Jellinek

Music is the vernacular of the human soul. -- Geoffrey Latham

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf. -- Walter J. Lippmann

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind. -- Hal A. Lingerman

Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world. -- Giuseppe Mazzini

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously. -- Henry Miller

I started making music because I could. -- Alanis Morissette

Music helps you find the truths you must bring into the rest of your life. -- Alanis Morissette

Music is spiritual. The music business is not. -- Van Morrison

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought. -- Theodore Mungers

Without music life would be a mistake. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

In music the passions enjoy themselves. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie Parker

Music should be something that makes you gotta move, inside or outside. -- Elvis Presley

It's the music that kept us all intact, kept us from going crazy. -- Lou Reed

The music business was not safe, but it was FUN. It was like falling in love with a woman you know is bad for you, but you love every minute with her, anyway. -- Lionel Richie

Music should never be harmless. -- Robbie Robertson

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music. -- Gioacchino Antonio Rossini

All music is important if it comes from the heart. -- Carlos Santana

Music is the key to the female heart. -- Johann G. Seume

The best music... is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with. -- Bruce Springsteen

All I try to do is write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it. -- Bruce Springsteen

In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain. --George Szell

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest. -- Henry David Thoreau

For heights and depths no words can reach, music is the soul's own speech. -- Unknown

Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us. -- Unknown

I believe in the power of music. To me, it isn't just a fad. This is a positive thing. -- Eddie Vedder

Music at its essence is what gives us memories. -- Stevie Wonder

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it. -- Ron Wood

Thanks to Danielle Hollister at EzineArticles.com for this list of Top 50 Music Quotations.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can I make a plea for number 51?

Music is the pleasure that the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. - Gottfried Leibniz

Of course, he was a mathematician and not a musician, but I think that he might have something. Then again, I'm a mathematician too.

The Solitary Walker said...

There's a big interplay between mathematics and music, isn't there? This makes me think of J. S. Bach.

Shifting the topic slightly, Goethe, who was a scientist as well as many other things, called architecture 'frozen music'. If the buildings he saw on his Italian Journey were frozen Vivaldi, I wonder what some modern structures like the Gherkin are?

Anonymous said...

Music: The finest form of human artistic expression. At it's best it connects directly to the soul with no need to for explanations for some form of intermediary. Pure feeling.

I enjoyed the quotes.

Anonymous said...

Interesting that Goethe called architecture "frozen music". It puts me in mind of Iannis Xenakis, the 20th century greek mathematician, architect and composer. He was a pioneer of stochastic music and the use of computers in composition.I have a feeling he has created buildings which were literally "frozen music" and, for that matter, music which was "molten architecture".

The Leibniz quote is uncannily close to Xenakis' approach. He was fond of using the example of a political demonstration, of how a multitude of seemingly random sounds could contribute to a rising emotional crescendo when perceived as a whole. Individual sounds might be quiet or loud, but the tendency was for them to get louder. He realised that the maths that described such events could be useful to musicians. If this sounds very dry and theoretical, it should be said that his music usually sounds anything but!

On the subject of the Gherkin, a lot of modern buildings with repetitive structures "look like" the minimalist music of the likes of Steve Reich.

I could go on. I find when driving on the motorway that if I listen to say, Steve Reich, it draws my attention to the repetitive structures of the road. Listening to Beethoven or Bach, on the other hand, draws my attention to the trees on the side of the road. Is this a typical response? Our brains are clearly interested in the structure of music in time in much the same way as they are interested in the physical structure of our environment in space.

The Solitary Walker said...

What you say is fascinating, Dominic, and it has certainly motivated me to investigate further stochastic theory - about which I know very little, I must admit. I love the 'molten architecture' concept.

It's interesting that many years ago I saw an exhibition of Bridget Riley's eye-tricking artworks at the Oriel Theatre Clwyd - and Steve Reich was being played as the 'musical soundtrack'. A perfect marriage, I thought. Something to do with the patterns of repetition and, far more importantly, the disruptions and irregularities in these patterns? That 'stochastic' idea seems to be found all over the place when you are aware of it - I'm not sure I understand it at all completely, but I think I'm now finding it demonstrated everywhere in nature - in the dawn chorus, in a human conversation, in a beehive, in the random/not-random way leaves fall from trees in the autumn. Etc. Or perhaps I'm simplifying what seems to be quite a complex theory.

am said...

Catching up. Just read this today:

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music. (Rumi)