Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
music is the most absorbing of all the arts. It absorbs the mind of the artist, whether creator or executant, to the exclusion of every other consideration outside his own immediate necessities or desires.
Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn't even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that's been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.
Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking. . . . the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things - all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.
In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom.
But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.
I cannot state enough how important post-production is for the success of a horror movie. You bring so much to it with the way you edit it, the way it is sound-designed, and the way the music works with it.
May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.
There are five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and 12 notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.
A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!
It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.
Just because a guitar is old doesn't make it good... I've seen guitars that were old but weren't as good as the reissue ... for me, it's not the age that makes it happen, it's the quality of the instrument.
We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.
Music is amazing. There's some metaphysical comfort where it allows you to be isolated and alone while telling you that you are not alone... truly, the only cure for sadness is to share it with someone else.
For us the most important thing is to be visual, and for the cats watching us to have fun. This is all we want. We get very upset if people get bored when we're only half way through smashing the second set.
When I left Genesis, I just wanted to be out of the music business. I felt like I was just in the machinery. We knew what we were going to be doing in 18 months or two years ahead. I just did not enjoy that.
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse. Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.
The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.
I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.
This severe, ascetic music, calm and horizontal as the line of the ocean, monotonous by virtue of its serenity, anti-sensuous, and yet so intense in its contemplativeness that it verges sometimes on ecstasy.
It's very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he's creating, the fact that he's experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we're in a brotherhood of some kind we're in it together.
People who love jazz musicians love us when we play what we want to play and we're starving. But as soon as you commercialize your sound like Wes Montgomery did, the jazz fans and the critics are down on you!
Everybody, no matter what vocation they're looking at, should add music as an essential to their curriculum. Music can be a very important part of your soul and your growth as a human being. It's so powerful.
Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.
The great British blues guitarists of the Sixties - people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green - could play like virtuosos, but they also understood the importance of energy and intensity
MySpace is so much more about culture and about creativity and expression. So in other words, you go on MySpace and you can find music, and you can find video, and things about politics, and things like that.
The punk rockers said, 'Learn three chords and form a band.' And we thought, 'Why learn any chords?' We wanted to make music like Ford made cars on the industrial belt. Industrial music for industrial people.
The trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments... it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst.
I have Nineties music oozing out of my pores. What made rock & roll back then is that it was uncensored. It was raw and dark. Think of 'Something in the Way,' by Nirvana - he was telling everyone how he felt.
Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There's not some trick involved with it. It's pure and it's real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.
I wanted a Gibson type sound, but with a Strat vibrato ... I bought a body from Charvel for $50.00 and a neck for $80.00 - I slapped it together, put an old Gibson PAF in it and painted it up with the stripes
Reggae has a philosophy, you know? It's not just entertainment. There's an idea behind it, a way of life behind the music, which is a positive way of life, which is a progressive way of life for better people.
I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.
I think if it doesn't do what I say, if it doesn't do what I want, if it isn't politically subversive, if it isn't sexy, if it isn't stylish to make all that happen then it isn't truthfully worth listening to.
I am focused on the work. I am constantly creating. I am a busy girl. I live and breathe my work. I love what I do. I believe in the message. There's no stopping. I didn't create the fame, the fame created me.
I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed... I have sung my songs all over the world and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs as their own.
Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God's goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.
I had no interest in music. But now, music means everything to me. I have no words to explain how beautiful music is. It is where you can create everything, like beautiful songs to sad songs to almost anything.
Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.
Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel.
In the '365 Fresh' MV, the story ends with us falling to the ground. Meanwhile, the 'Retro Future' MV features us falling onto a car in the beginning. The car that appears in both music videos is the same kind.
In oddball places, the electric guitar has been taken as an almost alien object - this weird, six-stringed instrument that fell down to earth and was then played loud but with traditional grace and intelligence
I studied communications, only because I could get my own show on the campus radio station. I never thought of it as a career. Music was always a really passionate hobby - it was like collecting DVDs or stamps.
Whenever you study composition you inevitably encounter Bach right off the bat. You can't get across the room without running into him and the other greats. Analyzing Bach absolutely influenced my jazz playing.
That's the beauty of country music - you have to get out there and earn it and work hard. And when you're on the road with big name acts, you realize there's no easy way to the 'Promised Land' in this business.
Neil Young and Barry Friedman had stolen a Buffalo Springfield sign off the steamroller for Barrys house. They put it up. We all looked at it on the wall and a light went off. That's how we came up with the name
Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.
The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.