Music Quotes - Page 13

• Damn it, when I'm bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic-take it or leave it.

  Dave Brubeck

  Want, Jazz, Reason

  Doug Ramsey, Dave Brubeck, Iola Brubeck, Paul Caulfield (2005). “Take five: the public and private lives of Paul Desmond”, Parkside Pubns

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• Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that.

  Dizzy Gillespie

  Men, Serious, Jazz

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• The life of the arts is far from an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nations' civilization.

  John F. Kennedy

  Art, Civilization, Quality

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• Sam Phillips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use whatever other influences I wanted, but never to copy...if there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field.

  Johnny Cash

  Use, Cotton, Might

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• Well, the way I play, I try not to be a 'repeater pencil', ya dig? Originality's the thing. You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality you ain't really nowhere. Gotta be original.

  Lester Young

  Play, Trying, Technique

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• The high note is not the only thing.

  Placido Domingo

  Crafts, Notes, Musical Life

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• I don't separate one era of jazz from another, because I listen to everybody... Everybody takes from everybody else and adds their own thing and goes on from there.

  Sonny Criss

  Add, Goes On, Eras

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• No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

  Sonny Rollins

  Derivatives, Jazz, Originals

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• One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really.

  Sonny Rollins

  Dedication, Important, Alive

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• Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

  Thelonious Monk

  Memorable, Thinking, Jazz

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• If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

  Thelonious Monk

  Bops, Jazz, Ifs

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• I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.

  Duke Ellington

  Funny, Girl, Piano

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• The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Strikes, Familiar, Effects

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• In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side - there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.

  Gilles Deleuze

  Song, Powerful, Air

  "Essays critical and clinical" by Gilles Deleuze, (p. 104), 1993.

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• Music is like a mirror in front of you. You're exposing everything, but surely that's better than suppressing. You have to dig deep and that can be hard for anybody, no matter what profession. I feel that I need to actually push myself to the limit to feel happy with the end result.

  Enya

  Mirrors, Needs, Matter

  "Everyone Thinks I'm So Shockable". Interview with Neil McCormick, www.telegraph.co.uk. November 24, 2005.

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• It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

  Morton Feldman

  Memories, Ideas, Elements

  "Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music" by Richard Kostelanetz, Joseph Darby, 1996.

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• Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

  Eduard Hanslick

  Mean, Sound, Speak

  Quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's "Intimate Letters". Sony Classical SK 66840,

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• The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.

  Hermann Hesse

  Attitude, Destiny, Expression

  "The Glass Bead Game". Book by Hermann Hesse, 1943.

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• It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

  Art Blakey

  Intelligent, Ears, Jazz

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• I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

  Carla Bley

  Taken, Jazz, Chords

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• I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

  Paul Desmond

  Musical, Jazz, Jazz Music

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• I expect the audience to come up to my level.

  Don Ellis

  Levels, Jazz, Come Up

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• Music makes me high on stage, and that's the truth. It's like being almost addicted to music.

  Jimi Hendrix

  Stage, Addicted To Music

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• Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

  Howard Dietz

  Inspirational, Thinking, Too Much

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• Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.

  Duke Ellington

  Thinking, Should Have, Littles

  Mark Tucker, Duke Ellington (1995). “The Duke Ellington Reader”, p.334, Oxford Paperbacks

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