MUSIC QUOTES IV

quotations about music

Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person.

SARAH DESSEN

Just Listen


Music recalls a state of feeling, and not merely a series of incidents. When we listen to the long-forgotten melody, we do not review the scenes and actions of our childhood in succession, but we become for the moment children once again.

ARTHUR HELPS

Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd


Music is the exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal, bursting forth in sound.

THOMAS AQUINAS

Summa Theologica


I don't read music. And my mom is this classically trained person, and I went the other way. And I think it's helped me write songs that I wouldn't have written if I were going at the technical way. Because they go, "Oh, you can't go from this chord to that chord. It's not the way you're supposed to do it."

MARIAH CAREY

Larry King Live, Dec. 19, 2002


We may regard rhythm as the intellectual side of music, melody as its sensuous side. The pipe is the one instrument that seems to affect animals--hooded cobras, lizards, fish, etc. Animals' natures are purely sensuous, therefore the pipe, or to put it more broadly, melody, affects them. To rhythm, on the other hand, they are indifferent; it appeals to the intellect, and therefore only to man.

EDWARD MACDOWELL

"The Origin of Music", Critical and Historical Essays


Hark to the music! How beneath the strain
Of reckless revelry, vibrates and sobs
One fundamental chord of constant pain,
The pulse-beat of the poet's heart that throbs.

EMMA LAZARUS

"Chopin"


Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa-- Who knows most, knows least.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

attributed, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly


Toyish airs please trivial ears.

FRANCIS QUARLES

Emblems


Darwin's theory that music had its origin "in the sounds made by the half-human progenitors of man during the season of courtship" seems for many reasons to be inadequate and untenable. A much more plausible explanation, it seems to me, is to be found in the theory of Theophrastus, in which the origin of music is attributed to the whole range of human emotion.

EDWARD MACDOWELL

"The Origin of Music", Critical and Historical Essays


Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

JOHN MILTON

Arcades


Articulating the connection between music and the outer world remains devilishly difficult. Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history.

ALEX ROSS

preface, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century


Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ

letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712


What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.

KEN LIVINGSTONE

interview, The Quietus, September 23, 2010


If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

Journal Intime


Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook


It was by music that the ancient kings gave elegant expression to their joy. By their armies and axes they gave the same to their anger.

CONFUCIUS

The Wisdom of Confucius


Music is the universal language of mankind -- poetry their universal pastime and delight.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Outre-Mer


Our relation to music must remain open, in a way. This is the privilege of music, not to let itself be formalized, to be locked in a certain procedure, in a certain way.

LUCIANO BERIO

interview with Bruce Duffie

Tags: Luciano Berio


Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

DANIEL J. LEVITIN

This Is Your Brain on Music


My earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head. I remember standing under a piano at my grandmother's house, when the keys of the piano were higher than my head and kind of pressing down on the keys, and then hearing one note and then looking for another one to follow it, because you always -- you know, if you're a musician or if you're a songwriter, somehow when you hear one note, you hear another one.

BONO

interview, Larry King Weekend, Dec. 1, 2002