Quotes About Music

If you listen to soul music, or R&B music, or Blues music, a lot of that came from church music and spiritual music, and music has always been a really really powerful tool that people have used to get them closer to God - whatever they define God as. And for me that's always been part of what drew me to it and keeps me coming back for more.

I think there is a big difference between the music business and music. And my relationship is to music, not music business. I think the business will keep changing, but music won't. Music will be there.

I was very young, maybe five. The opera was very... I was attracted to opera to the point that I think it's the reason I started to write music for films. I never studied. There are film and music school that teach you how to write music. I never studied that. But the influence of opera, which is a combination of storyline, visuals, staging, plus music... that was perhaps the best school I could have had. That's what gave me the idea of coming to Hollywood to write music for films.

My music is music that Christians and Catholics can listen to. Muslims. Buddhists. And non-religious people as well. It's just music. You can look at the music in several different ways. It's music for everybody.

We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.

I've always identified people's taste in music as being kind of hetero and/or homo - there's music people like because they feel like they have aesthetic similarity to it and the music they wish to create, and then there's music that represents the other, that they listen to because it represents an escape from the music that they have to make.

Obviously, it's had a huge effect on repetitive music or dance music or house music. Ambient in the last ten years has infiltrated into all those repetitive musics. I don't know what part it plays in pop necessarily but I'm sure there's some connection. But in all the music that deals with experimental repetition, drum and bass, dub, various kinds of house music, there's always been a quality of atmosphere and ambience. I think it's infiltrated that pretty heavily.

People around me are always an inspiration due to their love of the music and they help me to generate ideas for music. But it's really the passion and drive I have for my music that keeps me connected. I recorded my first song in the studio at 8 years old and I've taken it seriously since then. Making music is fun to me so I aim to translate those feelings into the music.

It's like soul music, isn't it all soul music? Otherwise what is it, non-soul music? I-have-no-soul music? Soulless music? People need to put a name on something to identify it, and I understand it.

I realized a lot of my friends were going to nightclubs and listening to house music. I was hanging out with them and going to clubs as well but I didn't really understand that kind of music. I was listening to country music and was heavily into Hank Williams, bluegrass, and Bob Dylan. So I just decided I really needed to understand what this music I was hearing in the clubs was all about.

All of my friends are really good dancers, which was initially why I never danced - we'd go out and they would kill it and I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna sit at the bar." I broke my foot, and I couldn't run for a year, but I realized I could kind of dance. It reminded me how amazing dance is; it's so in tune with music - it is music. It's a physical expression of whatever music is. On stage, you're interacting with things - physical things. So I've really started to like and notice the way people move with music.

Most conservatives know better than to promote the state funding of art. The result of such funding is the mess that modern art has become. Atonal music is to music what subsidized art is to art. ...The fact that cacophony has reigned almost supreme since 1900 is a testimony to Mises' original observation. Atonal music is to music what socialism is to economics: planned chaos.

Yeah. It's all in the music first. The music is like women to me. It's like how you pick your music: everybody got their own different way how they pick their women and their music, and I guess that's what the album becomes.

Music and time have such an interesting relationship. Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life and it really is like you're still there. That's why the music of our youth ends up being particularly powerful. The coming of age music that you grab a hold of as the symbol or the expression of your independence and hopes for the future and anger and rebellion or whatever it is you're feeling is so powerful for the rest of your life when you hear it.

You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

What bothers me is when music becomes entertainment. Of course, music is supposed to be entertaining, but go back to any period of time - music had a cultural significance on different levels, whether it was folk music, it was the news of the village, or it had to do with the rites of passage.

Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music.

To me, art and music inform each other continually, and when I was making more music there was an overall aesthetic that was shared by both mediums. Now I always listen to music when I work, so when I am working a lot, that is when I start searching out new music and finding new things to get excited about.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music.

My father did not bother that I play not a classical music. He always congratulated me for my development in music, I mean in any music but, he hang on to continue training at the Academy of Music... however, I never mentioned to my teachers that I trained myself at weekends in clubs.

Well, I am not sure of when my album will be released but my music has a lot of different sounds. I'm a hip-hop/R&B girl at heart, but I love pop music as well, and I even have an affinity for country music. So I would say my music might have something for everyone.

Enjoy music. Not the kind that rocks and rolls, but the music of the masters, the music that has lived through the centuries, the music that has lifted people. If you do not have a taste for it, listen to it thoughtfully. If you do not like it the first time, listen to it again and keep listening.

If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music.

I have always loved the process of making the music, reading the letters from the fans who get married to my music, have children to my music and play my music at their funerals.

I've never been passionate about just music, I've never seen myself going into music in that sense. My love for music has always been connected to the stories told through music, which is why I was drawn to theater and why I think 'Glee' is so powerful.

So, when you divide the world into music lovers, music fans and then those people who are just very casual about their music, it's wallpaper to them, it's elevator music, it's just the thing that's playing in the background that helps them through their day.

In the point of view of my personal feelings, I love the music as well as the cinema, but the future of a trumpet player - in the money point of view, but also any point of view - is very short on expectations. The life of a moviemaker can be glorious and wonderful. It can put your life in the best of possibilities. I decided to forget music. Not forget, because this is impossible, but to work in cinema, and just to be someone who loves music, and who tries to make music with his films.

When I play that music live nowadays, there's a lot of things I feel I'd like to do - even things I don't think the audience is aware of, like layering subs underneath the kicks, and layering crisp hats underneath the muddy, trashy hats of the '90s. If I tried to play the music as it was next to my contemporary music, it just sounds like you're closing up half of the sonic spectrum.

What good is music? None ... and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

I make music cuz it's almost like I can escape everything I was involved in. All I gotta do is make music. I don't do nothin but make music.

I've been spinning dance music since 1990, and genres always come and go. I think as technology becomes more accessible and it's easier for people to make music, they come and go quicker now, but it just comes with the territory. You come up with something new, something hot, and it rocks for a year. It's nothing different from any other genre of music. I mean, name one genre that's sounded the same for its entire existence. It doesn't happen.

I think it's like music for the sake of music, and a lot of the words stem from liking music a lot, wanting to be a good band and having a good sense of humour, and living in a situation where we're free to pretty much do what we want.

Perhaps it is to prepare to hear some day the music of the spheres that I am always turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for men at all. Nature has a patient ear. To her the slowest funeral march sounds like a jig. She is satisfied to have the notes drawn out to the lengths of days or weeks or months. Small variations are acceptable to her, modulations as leisurely as the opening of a flower.

Classical music and pop are two different universes, each with its own difficulties, peculiarities, depth and artistic dignity. In Italy, I think there is a fairly clear line of demarcation, but the history of music is full of fusion. Popular and classical music have always found points of contact, of crossing, exchange, both drawing mutual profit.

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

I had composed songs, I sang, and played the vina. Practising this music I arrived at a stage where I touched the music of the spheres. Then every soul became a musical note, and all life became music. Inspired by it I spoke to the people, and those who were attracted by my words listened to them instead of listening to my songs.

I love music so much that I have to try to make my own music. And not copy music. If I hear a song that I love - how is the groove and how is the beat and what is the feeling of this? - I can make it my own. So then I try, and I watch it become something totally different. But that's the way I have to do it.

Today, music is great for entertainment, but it is lacking soul; it's lacking substance, and it's difficult to find good stuff. There are too many corporate interests. It's not about the actual music because it's about the corporation, and music just becomes part of a package.

I studied piano from the age of three. My grandmother taught piano. I stayed at her house during the day while my parents worked. I obviously wanted to learn to play. And so she asked if she could teach me, and my mother said don't you think she's too young. My grandmother apparently said no. So I could read music before I could read, and I really don't remember learning to read music. So for me it's like a native language. When I look at a sheet of music, it just makes sense.

I often envy a filmmaker or a playwright or an author where people are like, "Yeah, I sat down every night and read your book and it was beautiful." Or, "Yeah, I went to the movies and all I did was watch the movie because that's all you could do at the movies." Where with music, it's like, "Ugh, I love your music. I listen to it while I'm jogging thinking about how I hate my body." But it is also the privilege of being a musician is you can have your music in this documented form and play it live and that's, I think, what draws me to it the most.

Mainly, I don't like it when music is made solely to impress people or in order to please business people; it doesn't sound good to me. If you're making music in order to become famous or loved by the masses that's not what I'm about. When somebody's making music for the wrong reasons, I hear it right away.

Yeah, I can't separate the art from the music and the music from the art. I think that stems from going to school for film first, and kind of stumbling onto music as my career.

You are still lucky - you have a certain type of people who keep buying your music - but then you can get typecast and have to keep making that same music, and you can change only slightly. It's risky to bounce around and change your type of music.

I'm extremely happy about music altogether, and the history that I've made. How I changed the world, music-wise, music over the internet and stuff like that.

For me, my number one priority always has to be the music, and I'm going to work school around my music - not music around my school.

I think music gives so much inspiration. I listen to all kinds of music: pop, hip-hop, everything. I also love classical music.

Keep making music.. Keep improving your music.. If there's no viral action on your music, you're just not good enough. Don't get mad at the audience, get mad at yourself. Either give up or get better.

If your whole world of a band or music is taking place in a digital realm or on technological devices, it's all mediated through those things. That takes away from the experiential and sensual nature of music. That's a lot less exciting for me to think about. It's not my ideal way of living with music.