English Music Quotes

• The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

  Thomas Beecham

  Love, Funny, Music

  In New York Herald Tribune 9 Mar. 1961

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• There actually had been a tradition within English music of the '60s of people looking eastwards, maybe in quite a naïve way, but nonetheless, you had musicians like George Harrison or Bryan Jones recording the musicians of Joujouka in North Africa.

  Justin Adams

  People, Musician, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is one thing on earth more terrible than English music, and that is English painting.

  Heinrich Heine

  Sarcastic, Earth, Painting

  8 Copy quote

• An Englishman will take you into a large room, beautifully proportioned, and will point out to you that it is white- all over white- and somebody will say what exquisite taste. You know in your own mind, in your own soul, that it is not taste at all˘that is the want of taste˘that is mere evasion. English music is white and evades everything.

  Edward Elgar

  White, Soul, Mind

  Edward Elgar, Percy Marshall Young (1968). “A future for English music, and other lectures”

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• One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spiritual, Determination, Adventure

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Past, Air, Bird

  9 Copy quote

• I grew up listening to English music.

  Ryan Tedder

  Listening, Grew Up, Grew

  6 Copy quote

• I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Spiritual, Exercise, Imagination

  7 Copy quote

• Mexican music runs through my veins. I loved it. Growing up, my father didn't allow us to listen to English music at home. That's all I heard. I had no choice.

  Jenni Rivera

  Running, Growing Up, Father

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• I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the war.

  Roger Waters

  War, Five

  Q magazine, November 1992.

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• The people have no ear, either for rhythm or music, and their unnatural passion for pianoforte playing and singing is thus all the more repulsive. There is nothing on earth more terrible than English music, except English painting.

  Heinrich Heine

  Passion, People, Insulting

  4 Copy quote

• English music is white - it evades everything.

  Edward Elgar

  White, Music Is

  Edward Elgar, Percy Marshall Young (1968). “A future for English music, and other lectures”

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• There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing...

  John Deacon

  England, American Music

  Interview with Jim Ladd, queenarchives.com. 1977.

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• People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

  Harrison Birtwistle

  Writing, People, Becoming

  7 Copy quote