Quotes About Music

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.

You put music in categories because you need to define a sound, but when you don't play it on your so-called radio stations that claim to be R&B or jazz or whatever... All music is dance music. But when people think of dance music, they think of techno or just house. Anything you can dance to is dance music. I don't care if it's classical, funk, salsa, reggae, calypso; it's all dance music.

You have a history of art-music that you equate with music. That's what I love about that term art-music. It separates itself from music-music, the music people have always made.

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?

Hip hop music and soul music have been the two main motivators for me musically. The music I make is hip hop soul, but I do make r&b music as well. I don't think I make r&b music to the point where I'm accurately categorized. There's more to what I have to offer and offer in the future. People could choose to respect it or not, but I pray that you do. As long as you get it, support it, and pay for it, it doesn't really matter.

I write my music with the idea that it will appeal to all of those people, and I want them to go in with all the history that's within all of us - all the things that they've listened to in the backs of their minds, whether it's country music or minimal techno, or classical music or whatever. I want them to bring that excitement, that love, or that hate, or whatever it might be, to my music. I feel that my music draws on so many different things.

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.

Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I'd listen to Italian music.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created.

I think I'm really part of a whole generational movement in a way. I think a lot of other people since and during this time have gotten interested in writing what we can still call experimental music. It's not commercial music. And it's really a concert music, but a concert music for our time. And wanting to find the audience, because we've discovered the audience is really there. Those became really clear with Einstein on the Beach.

Music is life. Music defines peoples' experience on this planet. Name one time in your life that wasn't punctuated by the music you listened to at the time. When people are down, they listen to music that commiserates that emotion. When people are amped up, they listen to more upbeat, loud songs.

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.

I think if there's ever been a time we need music more, it's now. For our kids, it teaches you to take time, to listen, to work together, to listen to other people, and to use your brain. That's why classical music doesn't work when you throw it at people in a subway platform while they're rushing to work. Classical music is something that needs to be contemplated, you have to be completely present with an active mind that's working. It's not background music.

I’ve never used music to sell my faith and I’ve never used faith to sell my music. I think they are both intrinsic parts of who I am. We’ve always tried to define our music outside of genres…what is a genre? A genre’s a cage or a box and for us our music is best with fangs and some claws running free in the wild.

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.

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

I'd rather call it "instrumental creative music," especially the music that I've been doing. If a person would hear that music, they would undoubtedly call it "jazz." There is this whole generation of musicians that are playing and thinking critically for themselves and making music that's relevant to today. I hope that's the objective of a lot of musicians.

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.

And in an era where radio stations that are inclined to play Styx music are your classic rock stations and the stations that play current music look at us as dinosaurs - the only way we could reach people with our new music, generally, is to perform live.

In many cases, the decision to study music has robbed them of the ability to play music. They have lost respect for music that comes from within because they have been programmed to feel "unworthy".

This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?

I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't. And clearly the ones who wrote music were more superior human beings in his mind. So he kind of nudged me and sort of prodded me into it. I picked it up slowly. Then I learned more about chords and harmony and I just kept adding to that. One of the great things about having good players in your band is that you just ask them questions. You can pick up some good information that way.

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.

I've only had a sit-down encounter with Robert once, and that one conversation was the best advice that I have gotten from any individual in the music industry. R Kelly told me that as long as I write life and not music I will always have a job. He listened to several of my records and told me that they were great records and for that to come from a man who has produced hit after hit gave me a comfort and reassurance that making honest and good music was not in vain.

The only other style of music that attempts to go to the deeper place of the silence that is music is New Age music.

I don't want to do a gimmick. It's a bummer that that's how it is. I would say, personally speaking, consuming music now is harder than it was before. It's like being stuck in a slot machine. There's just so much noise. It's just constant noise. It's harder to clear your head and give the time to music that a lot of it really deserves. It's really crazy how different your relationship to an album or music becomes, even if it's digital, if you spend the $7 to $10 on it. It forms this relationship where you're not just going to throw it away.

I think music changed when Bruce Springstee came on the scene. I think if it wasn't for Bruce Springstee, music would have gone in a very scary direction. We may have gotten to where disco music ruled - and I would've had to quit.

The music industry went through such a strange stretch in 1977, especially in this country, with the whole punk rock thing coming about. Punk was rebellious-and justified in that response-but it had very little to do with music, and so it created a highly-charged but frighteningly floundering atmosphere that I found very, very disheartening. Musical quality for me has always been an important part of rock'n'roll-and winning recognition for that has long been an uphill battle all the way. Punk seemed like rock'n'roll utterly without the music.

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 think the most important thing is that I'm making music that the people enjoy. So the fans, the people that are out there listening to music and consuming music, I want them to enjoy it and love it. And so that's more important to me than Grammys.

In so many areas, when you think about it, you never really see an actor cross over to music. It always music to acting and it's receivable because when music gives a form of entertainment of art to where it's very personable, it's a passion, it's an intimate type of art to when you hear it, it's them.

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 love the 80s. I always used to watch that VH1 show, 'I Love the 80s,' nonstop. I love the 80s, everything about it, the clothes, the music. Especially the music. The music is so happy. It's great.

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.

At the root of all power and motion, there is music and rhythm, the play of patterned frequencies against the matrix of time. We know that every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing. Before we make music, music makes us.

You certainly don't hear any country music on pop radio today. But for a while you did, and it was a lovely thing to have all the different genres of music cohabitating the Top 40 - the folk sound, The Beatles, the British sound, the Motown sounds, that kind of light country - it was a welcome relief after a few hard rock records. Everyone was sharing the airwaves, and I think it was a beautiful time for American music.

Lately I feel films are more and more like music. Music deals with abstractions and, like film, it involves time. It has many different movements, it has much contrast. And through music you learn that, in order to get a particular beautiful feeling, you have to have started far back, arranging certain things in a certain way. You can't just cut to it.

Obviously I want my music on the radio and I want my record to do well, but I also have a totally different career, so a lot of people who are in music are just in music and can dedicate all their time to that and I can't do that, so I really want to have both things and I'm just trying to figure out how.

Through music I either tame my demons or unleash them and allow them to be what they are. I don't want the music to be about provocation, I want the music to bring you to a place where you feel at home

I’ve broken a cardinal rule of art, music, and career paths: actors are supposed to act, and musicians are supposed to music. That’s how it works. You don’t buy fish from a dentist, or ask a plumber for financial advice, so why listen to an actor’s music?

The Nile Project is the performing side of an effort that also includes education in music and environmental issues, raising awareness of the entire Nile basin as an ecosystem. With such vibrant music, the good intentions were a bonus; the Nile Project was a superb example of what I call small-world music, of what happens to traditions in the information age.

... the hardest studio music to play is Tom & Jerry - cartoons. The music makes absolutely no sense, as music. You can't get into hearing it. There's nothing to hear-'bleep!, blop! scratch!' and it comes fast; everything's first take. That'll change the way you look at life.

We [with Cisco Adler] came back to the concept that our music, our lifestyle, and what we stood for was dope. So whoever the show brought to the music, they would stick. It was a way to bring people to the music, and I'm still doing that.

A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldnt have happened without the social changes.

As an artist, I feel that my father's biggest influence is me realizing that music has a purpose and it's not just for business and that music is spiritual. I get that from him that music is a spiritual thing.

You know that that thing is going to be as crisp and as clean, as many times as you want to watch it. So, I knew that the film was going to be watched multiple times, a lot like with music videos. Music videos aren't designed to be watched once. They're designed to be watched hundreds of times. On a certain level, the film was dream logic-ed, like a music video

Music should be healing. Music should uplift the soul. Music should inspire.

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.