MUSIC QUOTES III
quotations about music
Music is always migrating from its point of origin to its destiny in someone's fleeting moment of experience.
ALEX ROSS
preface, The Rest Is Noise
Who first said that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, I know not; but that it is true, I am sure. Who has not felt the melting power of music, and stopped to listen to the sweet strains of some simple melody which has brought, or nearly brought, tears to his eyes? Where is the breat that has not been stirred by the cathedral organ, and choristers echoing their sacred strains through the aisles and corridors, and dying away, as it were, in heaven above? Will not the sweet but simple ballad of "Home, Sweet Home," when sung in a foreign land, wake memories from the dead, and melt the hardest heart; rouse every grand, noble, unselfish, and patriotic feeling in the breast, and carry the hearer thousands of miles across the storm-tossed oceans and seas that separate him from his own beloved country, the dwelling place of those near and dear to him, the model land of his heart, the resting place of his sires, his adored and honored fatherland.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Music", Short 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"
The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental--that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.
ADAM PHILLIPS
The Paris Review, spring 2014
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
JOHN MILTON
Arcades
Toyish airs please trivial ears.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
Music is the exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal, bursting forth in sound.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
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
I wish my life had background music so I could understand what the hell is going on.
ANONYMOUS
Music ... is the frozen tapioca in the ice sheet of History.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Conversations with Goethe"
The field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
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
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
Music is the link between earth and heaven.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
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, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Letter to Mr. B--"
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
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.
PLATO
The Republic
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
Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heaven we have here below.
JOSEPH ADDISON
A Song for St. Cecilia's Day