quotations about music
The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental--that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.
ADAM PHILLIPS
The Paris Review, spring 2014
The passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, The Journal of Eugene Delacroiz
If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
I wish my life had background music so I could understand what the hell is going on.
ANONYMOUS
Music is the exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal, bursting forth in sound.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
Not only is music a beautiful and sublime science, the study of which ennobles and purifies the mind of its votary, but how many and excellent are its ministries to others!
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Wor
We may regard rhythm as the intellectual side of music, melody as its sensuous side. The pipe is the one instrument that seems to affect animals--hooded cobras, lizards, fish, etc. Animals' natures are purely sensuous, therefore the pipe, or to put it more broadly, melody, affects them. To rhythm, on the other hand, they are indifferent; it appeals to the intellect, and therefore only to man.
EDWARD MACDOWELL
"The Origin of Music", Critical and Historical Essays
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712
What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.
KEN LIVINGSTONE
interview, The Quietus, September 23, 2010
Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person.
SARAH DESSEN
Just Listen
Darwin's theory that music had its origin "in the sounds made by the half-human progenitors of man during the season of courtship" seems for many reasons to be inadequate and untenable. A much more plausible explanation, it seems to me, is to be found in the theory of Theophrastus, in which the origin of music is attributed to the whole range of human emotion.
EDWARD MACDOWELL
"The Origin of Music", Critical and Historical Essays
It was by music that the ancient kings gave elegant expression to their joy. By their armies and axes they gave the same to their anger.
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius
Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa-- Who knows most, knows least.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly
Who first said that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, I know not; but that it is true, I am sure. Who has not felt the melting power of music, and stopped to listen to the sweet strains of some simple melody which has brought, or nearly brought, tears to his eyes? Where is the breat that has not been stirred by the cathedral organ, and choristers echoing their sacred strains through the aisles and corridors, and dying away, as it were, in heaven above? Will not the sweet but simple ballad of "Home, Sweet Home," when sung in a foreign land, wake memories from the dead, and melt the hardest heart; rouse every grand, noble, unselfish, and patriotic feeling in the breast, and carry the hearer thousands of miles across the storm-tossed oceans and seas that separate him from his own beloved country, the dwelling place of those near and dear to him, the model land of his heart, the resting place of his sires, his adored and honored fatherland.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Music", Short Essays
Our relation to music must remain open, in a way. This is the privilege of music, not to let itself be formalized, to be locked in a certain procedure, in a certain way.
LUCIANO BERIO
interview with Bruce Duffie
Articulating the connection between music and the outer world remains devilishly difficult. Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history.
ALEX ROSS
preface, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
Music is the universal language of mankind -- poetry their universal pastime and delight.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Outre-Mer
My earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head. I remember standing under a piano at my grandmother's house, when the keys of the piano were higher than my head and kind of pressing down on the keys, and then hearing one note and then looking for another one to follow it, because you always -- you know, if you're a musician or if you're a songwriter, somehow when you hear one note, you hear another one.
BONO
interview, Larry King Weekend, Dec. 1, 2002