Modern Music Quotes

• Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

  Victor Hugo

  Music, Sound And Music, Musical Life

  140 Copy quote

• Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear.

  Frank Zappa

  Song, Writing, Artist

  21 Copy quote

• Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

  Pietro Mascagni

  Music, Jazz, Modern

  49 Copy quote

• I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.

  Michael Tippett

  Art, Integrity, Conspiracy

  7 Copy quote

• Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Inspirational, Music, Jazz And Life

  279 Copy quote

• Without the blues, modern music would be nothing like it is now - not remotely.

  Henry Rollins

  Would Be, Modern

  7 Copy quote

• Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Wisdom, Philosophy

  Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Kerst, Henry Edward Krehbiel (1964). “Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words”, p.13, Courier Corporation

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• All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

  Louis Armstrong

  Funny, Music, Song

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 7 July 1971

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• All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff...Basically what people want to hear is: I love you, you love me, the leaves turn brown, they fell off the trees, the wind is blowing, it got cold, you went away, my heart broke, you came back, and my heart was okay...Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear. Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them on the ass...If lyrics make people do things, how come we don't love each other?

  Frank Zappa

  Song, Love You, Writing

  36 Copy quote

• There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying.

  John Philip Sousa

  Wind, Balance, Orchestra

  7 Copy quote

• That's what so sad about a lot of modern music, in my opinion, so many young bands never stay around long enough to fulfill their ultimate promise. They only get halfway there or a quarter of the way there.

  Alan Vega

  Halfway There, Long, Promise

  7 Copy quote

• The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

  Gavin Bryars

  Festivals, Academic, Modern

  Klassiknet Interview, www.culturekiosque.com.

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• All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

  Frank Zappa

  Funny, Music, People

  78 Copy quote

• But I can't really say there is too much modern music that I'm blown away by at this moment

  Duncan Sheik

  Too Much, Moments, Modern

  8 Copy quote

• Modern music and artistry would look and sound completely different if not for the groundbreaking contributions Michael Jackson gifted to the world.

  L.A. Reid

  Looks, World, Sound

  "New Michael Jackson music coming in May" by James Montgomery, www.mtv.com. March 31, 2014.

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• As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Thinking, Imagination

  6 Copy quote

• What's holding me up is I'm confused about the nature of the music. Because the modern music doesn't reach me. I mean to say the sound of the modern electric production. A lot of sequencers... synths. That's what people are buying. Because that doesn't reach me, it throws me back to like 1948, but I don't want to be there. Back there, I'm talking about blues records... The roots of rock'n'roll is rhythm and blues and that's like really where I'm at, where I was always at.

  Joe Strummer

  Confused, Mean, Rocks

  "Strummer on Man, God, Law - and the Clash". Interviewed with Richard Cromelin, articles.latimes.com. January 31, 1988.

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• In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Age, Looks, Too Much

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• The blues echoes right through into soul, R&B and hip hop. It's part of the make-up of modern music. You can't turn your back on the blues.

  Ronnie Wood

  Echoes, Hip Hop, Soul

  9 Copy quote

• If we think today the way TV is ordering us to think, we think of Einstein as someone modern. Stravinsky is modern music, but it came at the time of Birth of a Nation, which is an old movie.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Thinking, Today, Way

  Source: cinemagodardcinema.wordpress.com

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• What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

  Brian Eno

  Writing, What Matters, Atmosphere

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• To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, to those who expect a sinister frisson from modern music, it is my melancholy duty to point out that all the bomb throwing and guillotining has already taken place.

  Constant Lambert

  Taken, Bombs, Melancholy

  "Music, Ho!". Book by Constant Lambert , "The Revolutionary Situation", p. 32, 1934.

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• Modern music is three farts and a raspberry, orchestrated.

  John Barbirolli

  Music, Three, Raspberries

  Of modern music. Quoted in M Kennedy Barbirolli, Conductor Laureate (1971).

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• I heard a lot of different kinds of music. I heard country music, I heard jazz, I heard symphonic music, opera, everything you can think of except very modern music.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Country, Thinking, Different

  Source: artsmania.ca

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• The danger in having modern music tied to a period piece is that hearing something may take you out of the moment.

  Aldis Hodge

  Pieces, May, Hearing

  Source: www.rogerebert.com

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