quotations about music
We may regard rhythm as the intellectual side of music, melody as its sensuous side. The pipe is the one instrument that seems to affect animals--hooded cobras, lizards, fish, etc. Animals' natures are purely sensuous, therefore the pipe, or to put it more broadly, melody, affects them. To rhythm, on the other hand, they are indifferent; it appeals to the intellect, and therefore only to man.
EDWARD MACDOWELL
"The Origin of Music", Critical and Historical Essays
My earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head. I remember standing under a piano at my grandmother's house, when the keys of the piano were higher than my head and kind of pressing down on the keys, and then hearing one note and then looking for another one to follow it, because you always -- you know, if you're a musician or if you're a songwriter, somehow when you hear one note, you hear another one.
BONO
interview, Larry King Weekend, Dec. 1, 2002
Though I am not endowed with an ear to seize those earthly harmonies, which to some devout souls have seemed, as it were, the broken echoes of the heavenly choir--I apprehend that there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto would bring us in our singing to the level of shrieking maniacs or howling beasts.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
G. K. CHESTERTON
attributed, The Pleasure Instinct
It was a moment when your music was the totality of your identity, and so you were so caught up and so invested in it.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
interview, Rolling Stone
Modern music, headstrong, wayward, tragically confused as to what to say and how to say it, has mounted its horse, as the joke goes, and ridden off in all directions. If we require of an art that it be unified as a whole and expressed in a universal language known to all, if it must be a consistent symbolization of the era, then modern music is a disastrous failure. It has many voices, many symbolizations. It it known to one, unknown to another. But if an art may be as variable and polyvocal as the different individuals and emotional regions from which it comes in this heterogeneous modern world, then the diversity and contradiction of modern music may be acceptable.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
Music lends grace and dignity to life; it softens care, alleviates regrets, refines and enlivens sensibility, links the ideal to the actual, and suggests a flow of life in unison with its harmonies.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought