Quotes About Music

Creating music to fit the marketplace, so that music can be heard? If ever I thought that I even came close to catering to the marketplace, or designing my productions and my music to cater to what is currently fashionable, I would sell shoes for a living. For me, the marketplace can rot in hell. I will do music for the love of music and for the love of people who listen to music, and absolutely nothing else will drive me.

When I was in London I found house music and techno, and I love that s - t. It's my go-to music. It's the closest for me to the old funk of James Brown and the repetitive dance music that I like from the soul music. I'd love to do a live album, like a little bit old school but still progressive, influenced maybe by more electronic music. I like everything, but I don't know anything about music. So it comes in to a lot of different ingredients.

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.

I don't know why people have to categorize things in music under music. It's music and it's music and it's music. When you start putting genres on things, I think it's completely ridiculous, and I hate that.

My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.

Pop music is a difficult term to define. I think about good music and bad music. Good music is good music whatever origin it comes from.

When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music.

In an odd way I thought I was lowering the bar for myself, in saying, well, I'll make a pop album. But in a way it's kind of harder to make pop music. It's like the more abstract you get with music, you get into that emperor's new clothes thing, where you can go anywhere, and just claim that your audience may not be prepared to go with you. But with pop music, I think everybody understands the form, everybody knows what it's meant to do. So I would say it's harder to write that kind of music.

If I make a movie that has a whole bunch of music in it, I get to listen to the music all day long, and I don't have to say, 'Well, I gotta go back to work and I gotta stop listening to the music.' I get to listen to music and go to work.

The New Kids took some hits for, you know, not writing their own music. But on a songwriting standpoint, I mean, I'd never written music before when I was in the group, ... Now the music is my music, so it's kind of like my baby, and that was a whole different experience.

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

Rock and roll came in and changed my life and changed the whole music scene forever, and then I grew to love R&B and Motown and all black music, gospel music. But I never dismiss any form of music. I listen to everything.

I find a difference between what gets called world music - a fusion of western music and music from different cultures in more of a modernized version - and Explorer Series stuff, which is completely undiluted indigenous folk music. That's a lot more powerful than a lot of the super-processed stuff that comes out now.

The most important thing is that you make sure you follow the music, which is a musician's way of saying follow your heart. The two things are intertwined. You know, when you even mention the phrase "music business," the older you get, the sourer it sounds. It's a terrible business, you know. Music and business have nothing to do with each other; there's no correlation, so it's always a rub. I would encourage people, don't be swayed by the music business. If you're truly, in your heart, a musician, stay one, and let the business find you.

Music was around in my family in two ways. My mother would occasionally sing to me, but I was mostly stimulated by the classical music my father had left behind. I had an ear for music, I suppose, so that's what began my interest in music.

There is a terrible thing that's been happening probably for the last 20 years or so and it's called the music business. And music isn't really business; it's work and you got to pay and you've got to buy your guitar or go into the studio. So there is a business side but when people say, "I'm going into the music business," it's not. It's about expression. It's about creativity. You don't join music, in my mind, to make money. You join it because it's in you; it's in your blood stream.

My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.

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.

The show is coming from the music. I get on the stage with the band, and I communicate with my musicians, and the music that we create and all that is coming out of us. The music is making the show and the music is creating the atmosphere, so if you close your eyes and listen and feel what it is that's coming out of the speakers, that's the whole point.

You know when I started playing music as a young man I felt the need to be noticed and to prove myself. My motivation is much different now but what's still left is the love of music and the joy of entertaining people- the feeling that I make a difference, giving something back rather than just taking. Every year or two I come out with new music, or new arrangements of old music which keeps my show fresh.

I've always played music and I've always been in bands and there have been periods in my life where the music has taken a much more front row seat than any acting. For a big period of time the acting work was really a way of raising money to fund my music. And then that all sort of changed around and that's fine.

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.

Because for me, '60s pop music is amongst the most complicated or complex music because it has so many resonances which strike you. The music itself is often simple, but the way that I interpret it, or the way I think it's interpreted culturally, is very complex.

My music has always been the same. It's the same kinda music but of a better quality. For me nothing really changes just the work rate. It's the work rate that changes more than the music.

I didn't graduate high school, so I never got a teacher's education, I'm mostly self-read, self-taught. I always loved music, so I would probably either be in a band with another group of people, or an arranger, a producer, a musicologist, a music history guy, something to do with music. Either that, or I would probably be in jail. Or dead.

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 heard Q-Tip on the Jungle Brothers' song 'The Promo.' It was very exciting. It was very new. The music and the culture around hip-hop was evolving. I think there's an emotional quality to their music and there's a vulnerability to the music. For me, A Tribe Called Quest was my Beatles.

I really like to absorb the project and watch it and work on the music a lot and just get the feel for it until eventually a moment comes where I know I've got it. A lot of it is trial and error. Some days a piece of music doesn't work then other day another piece of music finally says something and works with the picture and suddenly casts a light on all the other stuff you've done - probably because my mind is getting to understand it and the piece is educating me. I always feel like the score is in there already somewhere and I just have to channel it and accent it.

Back in the day, music imitated life. Now it's the opposite way around: life is imitating music. It's like whatever the rappers say, people think that that's how we're supposed to be; but back then, we kind of looked at the streets, and we made music for that.

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.

My music is homegrown from the garden of New Orleans. Music is everything to me short of breathing. Music also has a role to lift you up - not to be escapist but to take you out of misery.

The best pay off in the world is when someone comes up to you and says, 'your music has helped me with some pretty rough times through life. I don't know if I would still be here if it was for your music whether it be country music or heavy metal has done for me.' That's ultimately the biggest payoff for me. I hear it from young kids to military guys and military women to older folks.

The translator has to be a good writer. The translator has to hear music too. And it might not be exactly your music because the translator needs to translate the music. And so, that is what you are hoping for: a translator who gets what you are doing but who also gets all the ways in which it won't work in the new language.

It's funny, now that we have Twitter and Facebook and stuff, you can really see how you affect fans. Before all that, fans couldn't tell you exactly how they feel, unless they came up after a show, and even then you can't stand there and talk to everybody in the audience. So it's nice to see people tweet me and say, "Your music has changed my life," or "I had my baby to your music," or "I got married to your music." I've heard so many things, and it's amazing to hear people's stories and how you affect their life.

There tend to be two different drives that lead young people toward music. One is that music provides an escape; it takes you away from the unhappiness or torture of where you are and makes you feel less alienated-you believe there is a place you fit in somewhere else. The other is a sort of transcendent, spiritual feeling in the purity of music.

If you are involved with the intensity of crescendo situations, with the intensity of tragedy, you might begin to see the humor of these situations as well. As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.

My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.

What I love about '80s rock music is the amazing, fantastic melodies. In pop music, it's all about the techno beat to dance to in the club and the repetitiveness, whereas in rock music there is literally, like, balls-to-the-wall singing and playing. I love it.

I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music.

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.

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

It's quite interesting that in my growing up I had several influences. We had gospel music on campus. R&B music was, of course, the community, and radio was country music. So I can kind of see where all the influences came from.

If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

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.

I just listen to so much music that I like the role music can play in scoring something. I'm not doing song parodies or funny songs, I'm just adding some music to my words. So it's limited and specific, but as a performer I find it pretty enjoyable.

Music is very important. It's important as a tool for learning, it can be a tool for healing, it can be no telling what, as long as we remain free to be able to create the music, to be able to experiment and to really research, and to really get time to develop the music.

I think people use temp music quite a bit, but the people who write the temp music don't ever really learn that their music was inspiring a movie.

I think emotion is just anything that is emotional, you know, people can feel with music. Music is already so emotional, like the strings, the chords, and the notes and the melodies and stuff. And then you throw on a topic that everyone can relate to. That's gonna be real music.