Quotes About Music

I did not like that name "world music" in the beginning. I think that African music must get more respect than to be put in a ghetto like that. We have something to give to others. When you look to how African music is built, when you understand this kind of music, you can understand that a lot of all this modern music that you are hearing in the world has similarities to African music. It's like the origin of a lot of kinds of music.

Music, to me, is the most beautiful form, and I love film because film is very related to music. It moves by you in its own rhythm. It's not like reading a book or looking at a painting. It gives you its own time frame, like music, so they are very connected for me. But music to me is the biggest inspiration. When I get depressed, or anything, I go "think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!" So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?

As far as my single selections, over the years it's been a very essential part of my survival tactic, but I have no problem being able to jump on records with whoever people think is the rawest rapper in the game or number one or King or whatever they wanna name themselves, to be honest with you. It doesn't affect me, 'cause that's what I come from; I'm comfortable in that zone. But I don't wanna make hood music, I don't wanna make street music, I want to make world music, global music, international music.

I'm from Louisiana, and that's where I got my start, in Cajun music. There's a huge music scene down there centered around our culture. Those are people that are not making music for a living. They are making music for the fun of it. And I think that's the best way I could have been introduced to music.

I want people to look at themselves. I want people to go into a space for meditation. It's funny to use a word like meditation as the music is fairly brutal but there is a hypnotic element to it and the way that I try and create that for someone just happens to be through a fairly heavy form of music. You are constantly barraged and beaten down with a lot of bullshit and I find that heavy and extreme music helps me to go into a very tranquil place and I hope, more than anything, that the music does create a space for people to go inward with.

Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.

It's too bad music can't be like movies. For me, playing music and listening to music and creating music is very environmental. It creates a certain environment; it sets a specific mood.

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.

I still make music. I still write music and I record music, I just don't trust music promotion [and] distribution right now enough to record a new set of diligently worked-upon compositions. I do trust the audience and the audiences very much.

I don't have any sympathy for the subject matter, [but] I have great respect for rap artists. In fact, not for the rap artists, but the people who make the music over which they rap. Rap music - the music itself is incredible - but [the people that make the music] are hardly ever credited.

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.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Bill Monroe spoke of bringing 'ancient tones' into his music with echoes of British and Irish fiddle and bagpipe music, while also delving deeply into American blues, gospel, folk hymnody, and hill country dance music. To that gumbo, he added the invigorating rhythms and harmonies of hot jazz. It was a new kind of American music, named in honor of his band The Blue Grass Boys to be known, simply, as bluegrass.

I'm definitely nostalgic about the music of my youth; The Clash and Fishbone and that whole music scene. I still have all that music to this day. There was some great music going on in the late 70s and 80s.

Music gets inside you, music captures you. Music becomes your heartbeat. It’s a drug and makes you feel whatever the song’s about.

When I hear music as a fan, I see fields. I see landscapes. I close my eyes and see an entire universe that that music and the voice, or the narrative, create. A music video-and any other kind of visual reference-is created by someone else.

My earliest memories about music are connected with going to church and listening to organ music. I am not from a musical family, actually, and I remember my first musical fascination to be for organ music. I wanted to become an organist and not a pianist.

Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different.

When I was fifteen years old, the only distinction in music my friends and I made was [that] there's music made by people with short hair and music made by people with long hair.

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.

Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times of your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

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.

My life has always been full of music..My father was a concert promoter when I was a kid so music has always been a part of my life growing up, furthering my desire to do music when I was old enough to create it on my own.

I do like people who are popular across the years and stuff like that, but I'm not a big pop music fan. I don't listen to the radio unless it's KCRW, like Booka Shade. Yeah, like weird music is what I'm really into right now. But I like anything really. There's just so much. I buy new music almost every day, so there's so much coming in that I don't even have time to listen to something more that twice.

Music was the one thing I could control. It was the one world that offered me freedom. When I played music, my nightmares ended. My family problems disappeared. I didnt have to search for answers. The answers lay no further than the bell of my trumpet and my scrawled, pencilled scores. Music made me full, strong, popular, self-reliant and cool.

Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them.

It came from my mother. She was a singer, and literally every day of the week she sang at a different club in a different genre of music: country, R&B clubs, jazz clubs, church on Sunday morning where she was the music director, pop hits, soft rock. I grew up listening to all this music, so it was never one thing for me.

I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded.

In most of my films I write the music into the script. I'm listening to songs and lyrics that empower the themes of the film. There's a lot of Indigenous music that has not been heard widely and I love the idea of giving that music to the rest of the world.

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.

I studied music all the way through college, but as soon as I graduated from university, I got straight into London and got straight into film music. So really my experiences have been being around the orchestras in London and being around the people who work in film music.

My main influences - I loved art. I sounds a little pretentious to say I was into art but I liked drawing. I liked music; music was my outlet from day one. I was giving you an image of Ireland being this dull, grey, massive unemployment, not much going on and the future was the dull queue or - and, for me, the window of hope was music and books. So I fell in love with sort of T-Rex and David Bowie very young. They sort of said, "Hey. You don't have to live in this north side of Dublin that's all grey and depressed. You can be a spider and go to Mars."

I'm obsessed with the countryside: woods, forests, fields, lakes, mountains. I'm really into folk music and folklore. But more so I'm into electronic music. I'm into bands that have both aspects, like Boards of Canada is a perfect example. You could listen to that type of music running through a woods. It's kind of what I wanted to achieve.

I don't know if there was really ever a golden age of the music business. Most of what was released has always been garbage and some has been able to get through and last. I don't know that it was much better thirty years ago. The music industry just wasn't as efficient. The music industry was more oddball guys who did it for fun and now they are huge corporations that have become more structured.

I think it's important to remember that music supervision is not just about a fantastic record collection or knowledge of music, although that certainly helps for aspiring music supervisors.

In my opinion, there is a huge lack of imaginative, unconventional music being created by artists today and what little there is, goes widely unappreciated by the masses. 'Port Blue' is my attempt at re-creating the music I want to hear and the emotions I want to feel." "If by chance you ever feel as though you’ve come to know these songs, please consider yourself a friend because in a manner of speaking, you know me. This music is my heart and soul. This is who I am." (Adam R. Young, 2006)

Next to meditation is music, soulful music, the music that stirs and elevates our aspiring consciousness.

Country music is still your grandpa's music, but it's also your daughter's music. It's getting bigger and better all the time and I'm glad to be a part of it.

Performance and music are inexorably tied together. And hell, I'll watch Brittany's Toxic music video all day. But there's a difference between that and listening to Leo Kottke play guitar. One is entertainment. The other is Music.

I've been extremely lucky to work with Elmer Bernstein, Howard Shore over the years, but I've always imagined films with my own scores, because I don't come from that world or that period of filmmaking. And so how could I make up my own score on a film like this where it isn't necessarily made up of popular music from the radio or the period; it isn't necessarily classical music. But what if it's modern symphonic music?

When music turned into being like candy - what people don't realize is, yes it's candy, but candy has long-term effects if you're just eatin' it as your main meal. And that's a problem, 'cause if you got music that keeps comin' at you, that keeps coming like a piranha, coming and rippin' at your soul, it's like yeah, I'm takin' this in, but there's not much of me left. Then you'll be lookin' for something outside of music to satisfy you, or take you away.

I always listen to music when I write! I basically make a playlist for every essay; sometimes it's just one song, or three songs, over and over and over. I sort of find the emotional pitch of the piece, and then match music to it, and then the music becomes a shortcut to the feeling, so I can enter it and work anywhere: on planes, cafes, at work, the train.

You know how a lot of people say, 'I lose myself in music,' or 'I like to escape,' but I want my music to be more of an awakening. I want it to make people to be aware of life; I don't want my music to be a distraction. I want to light a path.

In the digital age we're in now, with satellite radio and Pandora and stuff like that, it's not about, "I listen to this kind of music." It's about, "I listen to good music and bad music."

I gave up that idea of trying to make music that I thought other people would want. I just made music for myself and music for people that I knew.

I find myself more affected by music the more I do it. Particularly when you're touring and you're in the bus and you're listening to loads of music. Life becomes far more dramatic, I guess - you're never in the same place, you're constantly meeting new people. You almost become more sensitized to music.

A lot of people may not know how competitive it is to play classical music, because when you think about it, the music that you're playing is music that's been here for years. And all you're trying to do is improve upon it when you play.