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

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

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

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.