Music

Music is an art form that involves sounds and silence. Music may be used for artistic or
aesthetic, communicative, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The definition of what
constitutes music varies according to culture and social context.

Contents
• 1 Sourced
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 See also

• 4 External links

Sourced
• 2 A.M. and I'm still awake writing this song.
If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer
Inside of me, threatenin' the life it belongs to.
o Anna Nalick, "Breathe (2 A.M.)", Wreck of the Day (2005)

• All aspects of musical practice may be disengaged, and privileged, in order to

give birth to new forms of variation: variations on the relationships between the
composer and the performer, between the conductor and the performer, between
the performers, between the performer and the listener, variations upon gestures,
variations on silence that end in a mute music that is still music because it
preserves still something of the musical totality of the tradition...all elements
belonging to the total musical fact may be seperated and taken as a strategic
variable of musical production. This autonomization serves as true musical
experimentation: little by little, the individual variables that make up a total
musical fact are brought to light. Any particular music then appears as one that
has made a choice among these variables, and that has privileged a certain number
of them. Under these conditions, musical analysis would have to begin by
recognizing the strategic variables characteristic of a given musical system:
musical invention and musical analysis lend each other mutual aid.
o Jean Molino quoted in Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Abbate, Carolyn (translator)
(1987 (original), 1990 (translation)). Music and Discourse: Toward a
Semiology of Music. pp. 42–43. ISBN 0691027145.

• Being in a band is really great when you're 20. When you're 30, it's kind of 'Spinal
Tap,' and when you're 40, it's just pathetic.
o Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, quoted in "Make a Myth, Whip It Good",
New York Times, 2001-04-18.
• The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological
because it contains implications about the music's value.
o Green, Lucy (1999). "Ideology". Key Terms in Popular Music and
Culture. ISBN 0631212639.

• If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear,
we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose
progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's
perceptual habits."
o Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Abbate, Carolyn (translator) (1987 (original), 1990
(translation)). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. ISBN
0691027145.

• 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.
o Gilles Deleuze, from his Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 104.

• 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.
o Morton Feldman, quoted in Kostelanetz, Richard (editor) and Joseph
Darby (editor). Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music. ISBN
0028645812.

• Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light
on how music affects us and why it is so influential.
o Susan McClary, quoted in Sullivan, Meg (May 2002). Spotlight: Susan
McClary, Musicologist.

• 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.
o Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner
notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK
66840.

• One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that—melody,
rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that it
was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they
would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and
peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would
 always be our own and would be circumscribed, when so many other forces are
evidently in action in the final effect.
o Christian Wolff, quoted in Kostelanetz, Richard (editor) and Joseph Darby
(editor). Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music. ISBN 0028645812.

• Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life,
needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful
vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is
commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments
obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of
unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.
o Edgard Varese, quoted in Kostelanetz, Richard (editor) and Joseph Darby
(editor). Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music. ISBN 0028645812.

• The term 'chromatic' is understood by musicians to refer to music which includes

tones which are not members of the prevailing scale, and also as a word
descriptive of those individually non-diatonic tones.
o Shir-Cliff, J (1965). Chromatic Harmony. New York: The Free Press.
ISBN 0029286301.

• We can no longer maintain any distinction between music and discourse about
music, between the supposed object of analysis and the terms of analysis.
o Horner, Bruce (1999). "Discourse". Key Terms in Popular Music and
Culture. ISBN 0631212639.

• We must ask whether a cross-cultural musical universal is to be found in the

music itself (either its structure or function) or the way in which music is made.
By 'music-making,' I intend not only actual performance but also how music is
heard, understood, even learned.
o Dane Harwood (1976:522). "Universals in Music: A Perspective from
Cognitive Psychology", Ethnomusicology 20, no. 3:521-33

• We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.
o Wynton Marsalis in Smithsonian Magazine, November 2005.

• "Without music, life would be a mistake."

o Friedrich Nietzsche, in Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols)

• Orsino: If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
o Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Act I, sc. i

• "We get nearer to the Lord through music than perhaps through any other thing
except prayer."
o J. Reuben Clark, LDS Conference Report, Oct. 1936
 • "Music" includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission
of a succession of repetitive beats.
o Section 63 (1)(b) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994
(United Kingdom).
o This section attempts to define music played at raves, in order to give
police power to ban them. It was widely ridiculed at the time and since
(see, e.g., Marcel Berlins, "Writ Large", The Guardian, February 1, 1994).

Unsourced
• "Ahh...music, a magic far beyond all we do here."
o character Albus Dumbledore in JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the U.S.)

• "After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
o Aldous Huxley

• "But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience,
the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that
incredible, magical instrument."
o from the TV show Northern Exposure (episode 5x13, Mite Makes Right)

• "Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune."
o Kin Hubbard

• "For those of you seeking immortality, forget politics. Support the arts instead."
o Dr. Ruth Griffioen

• "Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned."

o George Bernard Shaw

• "I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to."
o Elvis Presley

• "I hate music, especially when it's played."

o Jimmy Durante

• "I look at it this way, if the guitarist jumps ship, and we can't replace him, i'll
point my gun at my drummer, and he'll point his at me, we'll count to three and
end this madness."
o Toast

• "If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying
to say it in music."
o Gustav Mahler
• "If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego.
You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off
from a good deal of experience."
o John Cage

• "Music is the chalk to the blackboard of life. Without it, everything is a blank
slate."
o Lexi Carter

• "Playing the blues is like having to be black twice - Stevie Ray Vaughan missed
on both counts, but I never noticed."
o B.B. King

• "There is only one better thing than music - live music."

o Jacek Bukowski

• “Thanks to great singers, music has acquired a human voice.”

o Leonid S. Sukhorukov

• "The immoral profession of musical criticism must be abolished."

o Richard Wagner

• "…I think, fundamentally, music is something inherently people love and need
and relate to, and a lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds. It's quick-
fix. You kind of have a stomachache afterwards."
o Trent Reznor, interview in Salt Lake Tribune, September 29, 2005

• "I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of
music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life
seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music."
o George Eliot

• "It seems like people get afraid of a certain music if they can't pigeonhole it to
their satisfaction...Good music is good music, and that should be enough for
anybody."
o Bradley Nowell

• The most important thing to me as a songwriter is the breath. The most important
thing I could say to somebody is, "Sometimes I just breathe you in."
o Tori Amos

• Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.
o Benjamin Disraeli

• Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be

silent.
 o Victor Hugo

• Musicians are the architects of heaven.

o Bobby McFerrin

• Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the
people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.
o Martin Luther

• Music is a laudable medium of soothening the hearts of people.

o M.S. Subbulakshmi

• Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which
lends utility to its conditions.
o George Santayana

• Music is love in search of a word.

o Sidney Lanier

• Music is everything one listens to with the intention of listening to music.

o Luciano Berio

• Music is organized sound.

o Edgard Varèse

• Music is the application of sounds to the canvas of silence.

o Carl Jung

• Music is the exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal, bursting forth in
sound.
o Thomas Aquinas

• Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
o John Erskine

• Music is what I love and it's what I feel and it's in me and to know that I can do
something that I enjoy and hopefully bring some enjoyment to other people
through is an incredible felling and I am just really thankful for it.
o Mariah Carey

• Music, like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the
heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.
o Jean Baptiste Montegut

• Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which
is the same thing nowadays.
 o Oscar Wilde

• Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
o G. K. Chesterton

• My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by
music when sick and weary.
o Martin Luther

• My mother's idol among pianists was Paderewski. I knew that I would never be a
Paderewski, so I searched among the other great pianists of the day, looking for a
model, and I found one at last who seemed to be just right for me. He was
Vladimir de Pachmann. His style was refined, and so was mine. He was
distinguished for the fact that especially in the works of Chopin he struck a great
number of wrong notes. It was here that I knew I could rival him, and perhaps
even excel him. You see, he struck his wrong notes in extremely rapid passages; I
worked at my technique until I was certain that I could strike great numbers of
wrong notes in very slow passages.
o Robertson Davies, "My Musical Career"

• My music is best understood by children and animals.

o Igor Stravinsky

• No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling
sensible.
o W. H. Auden

• The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
o Havelock Ellis

• Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that
it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
o Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

• There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief
in music.
o George Eliot

• There are two means of refuge from the misery of life—music and cats.
o Albert Schweitzer

• Those who are affected by music can be divided into two classes: those who hear
the spiritual meaning, and those who hear the material sound. There are good and
evil results in each case.
o Anonymous
• When we are touched by a song, it is because the artist cannot hide himself.
o Leonard Cohen

• The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to
music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what
the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."
o Aaron Copland

• "Look, I'm a pop star... I'm very busy. I do not have time to learn how to play a
musical instrument."
o Phil Oakey of The Human League

• The only thing to rely on is music, as it is the only thing that will be there when
you need it.
• Music is everywhere from the sound of your alarm to the word goodnight.
o Stephen Conlan

• Music is the human soul compressed into noise

o Richard Leadbeater

• "Never sound pompous. You always sound noble, noble. Absolute character of
music is nobility. Even popular music can be noble, you see. If it's not noble, then
it's not very good..Music is an art of emotion, of nobility, of dignity, of greatness,
of love, of tenderness. All that must be brought out in music but never a show of
pompousness."
o Arthur Rubinstein, during master class on Chopin's First Ballade

• "Assassins!"
o Arturo Toscanini to his orchestra
• "Music is the shorthand of emotion”
o Lev Tolstoy