Musical Quotes

There is nothing more musical than a sunset.

The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

I'd like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does-humans are a musical species.

The heart is like a musical instrument of many strings, all the chords of which require putting in harmony.

Even if you can't sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your home. But sing.

I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.

The virtuosos look to the students of the world to do their share in the education of the great musical public. Do not waste your time with music that is trite or ignoble. Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Saharas of musical trash.

Music is one of the closest link-ups with God that we can probably experience. I think it's a common vibrating tone of the musical notes that holds all life together.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original.

I wanted to be a veterinarian until I saw a video of a vet performing surgery on a dog. Then I decided I wanted to be a pianist.

It was about working with other musicians, but more than that it's about exploring musical areas that you could never do with the band you're in, in my case Judas Priest. You could tackle musical areas and lyrical areas that wouldn't be appropriate for Priest.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

Opinion in all parts of the world would agree that Rachmaninoff is the most complete of living masters of the instrument; his technique is comprehensive, and he is, of course, musical to his bone's marrow. Most important of all, he is a composer, and for this reason he is able to approach a work as none of his pianist contemporaries can approach one - that is, from the inside, as an organic and felt creative process.

I would like to involve myself in some black music. I would like to do some blues and some gospel music. I want to try stuff from other genres and try to widen my musical base.

Fine declamation does not consist in flowery periods, delicate allusions of musical cadences, but in a plain, open, loose style, where the periods are long and obvious, where the same thought is often exhibited in several points of view.

I blow my own mind like Nirvana, and go the whole nine like Madonna.

The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.

Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at 'hateful ragtime' no longer passes for musical culture.

How many chances to you get to make a musical about a serial killer? The minute Tim Burton approached me, I was in.

I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.

My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy.

I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories.

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

Nature endows us with the feeling that moves us in all our musical experiences; we might call her gift instinct.

Instead of weeping when a tragedy occurs in a songbird's life, it sings away its grief. I believe we could well follow the pattern of our feathered friends.

For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic and moving materializations of his emotions; he is called upon to make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in accordance with his own consciousness. In this way he, like the composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life.

Having a body that is like a musical instrument, open enough to be able to resonate, literally resonate with what is coming both from the inside and from the outside, so that one is able to surrender to powers greater than oneself.

Music should be your escape.

Don't know about a cabaret act right now, would actually prefer a role in a broadway musical.

God made me blind and unable to walk. BIG DEAL! He gave me the ability... the musical gifts I have... the great opportunity to meet new people.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?

Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one.

Imitate, assimilate, and innovate.

High School Musical has been a blessing and a gift.

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.

I have ambitions to do a Broadway record one of these days and get in the studio with like, a real orchestra. I'm a big musical theatre geek.

Everybody was on the same page. Nobody has really gone out there on a different musical journey. When we got back together again, we all wanted to do the same kind of music.

I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.

I’ve learned what ‘classical’ means. It means something that sings and dances through sheer joy of existence.

We are living in a cultural dark age of musical pollution. You put the radio on, and five minutes later you need an aspirin.

I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I'm now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones.

For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of what makes scary movies work.

When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

Schoenberg is too melodious for me, too sweet.