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Where words fail, music speaks.
-Hans Christian Andersen
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I have always kept one end in view, namely . . . to conduct a well-regulated church music to the honour of God.
-Johann Sebastian Bach
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Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.
-Johann Sebastian Bach
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This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and - more's the pity- the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock and no wanton hand will ever venture to defile it. Then, let every man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal.
-Ludwig van Beethoven
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I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man’s future.
-Leonard Bernstein
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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
-Leonard Bernstein, "The Unanswered Question" p. 140, 1976
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The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
-Leonard Bernstein
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Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
-Allan Bloom
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Sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is music where ever there is a harmony, order, or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart's Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes...
-Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1912
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I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication, because I noticed that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh. I determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it than communication. I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswammy that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation. I became less disturbed and went back to work.
http://www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.html
-John Milton Cage, An Autobiographical Statement
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We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
-John Milton Cage, An Autobiographical Statement
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Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.
-John Milton Cage
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"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."
-Thomas Carlyle
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I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.
-Pau (Pablo) Casals
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Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity...
-Pau (Pablo) Casals
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The most important thing in music is what is not in the notes.
-Pau (Pablo) Casals
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"Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart."
-Pau (Pablo) Casals
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"Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak."
N.B.: This quote is commonly misquoted as "savage beast."
-William Congreve
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"Music is the space between the notes."
-Claude Debussy
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"Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes."
-Claude Debussy, The Engulfed Cathedral (La Cathédrale engloutie) from Préludes
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"Collect impressions. Don’t be in a hurry to write them down. Because that’s something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture - a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is."
-Claude Debussy, in a letter to his pupil Raoul Bardac, 1906
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"There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art."
-Claude Debussy
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I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
-George Eliot
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"Music is the soul of language."
-Max Heindel
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These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity the sound achieved by the pig.
-Alfred Hitchcock
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If you don't have sex and you don't do drugs, your rock 'n' roll better be awfully good.
-Abbie Hoffman
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There is something very wonderful about music. Words are wonderful enough; but music is even more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do; it speaks through our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up, it puts noble feelings in us, it can make us cringe; and it can melt us to tears; and yet we have no idea how. It is a language by itself, just as perfect in its ways as speech, as words, just as divine, just as blessed.
-Charles Kingsley
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I didn’t find the idea of going in for music creatively particularly attractive in view of the decline in the history of musical achievement.
-Paul Klee
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"Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven."
-Walter Savage Landor
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"For a long time I wasn't listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty--it would bring back memories I didn't want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I'm not alive 'cause I'm not making it. And if it was good, I hated it 'cause I wasn't doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious 'cause I could've done it better..."
-John Lennon
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"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dream. Wandering by lone sea breakers, and sitting by desolate streams. World losers and world forsakers, for whom the pale moon gleams. Yet we are movers and the shakers of the world forever it seems."
-Arthur O'Shaunessey
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My vocation is more in composition really than anything else -- building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.
-Jimmy Page
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"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."
-Charlie Parker
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What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile. Fix me a toddy, Lola, and we'll sit on the gallery of Tara and you play a tune and we'll watch evening fall and lightning bugs wink in the purple meadow.
-Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
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He had always wanted to write Music and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikowsky's First Concerto, or the last movement of Rachmaninoff's Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the Music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that Music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers - Show me yours - show me that it is possible - show me your achievement - and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
-Ayn Rand
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When I wished to sing of love it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow it was transformed for me into love.
-Franz Schubert
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If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
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Music has often been compared with language itself, and the comparison is quite legitimate. While it combines easily with actual language, it also speaks a language of its own, which it has become a platitude to call universal. To understand the significance of the organizing factors of rhythm, melody, harmony, tone color and form, the analogy of a familiar language is helpful. Music has its own alphabet of only seven letters, as compared with the twenty-six of the English alphabet. Each of these letters represents a note, and just as certain letters are complete words in themselves, so certain notes may stand alone, with the force of a whole word. Generally, however, a note of music implies a certain harmony, and in most modern music the notes take the form of actual chords. So it may be said that a chord in music is analogous to a word in language. Several words form a phrase, and several phrases a complete sentence, and the same thing is true in music. Measured music corresponds to poetry, while the old unmeasured plain-song might be compared with prose.
-Sigmund Spaeth, The Art of Enjoying Music, McGraw-Hill, 1933
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"...music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself."
-Oscar Wilde, Intentions
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Books about Music
