To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.

Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.