quotations about music
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.
PLATO
The Republic
Music recalls a state of feeling, and not merely a series of incidents. When we listen to the long-forgotten melody, we do not review the scenes and actions of our childhood in succession, but we become for the moment children once again.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
The passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, The Journal of Eugene Delacroiz
Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic. The appreciation we have for music is intimately related to our ability to learn the underlying structure of music we like--the equivalent to grammar in spoken or signed languages--and to be able to make predictions about what will come next. Composers imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won't. The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person.
SARAH DESSEN
Just Listen
Music is the exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal, bursting forth in sound.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712
Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa-- Who knows most, knows least.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly
Our relation to music must remain open, in a way. This is the privilege of music, not to let itself be formalized, to be locked in a certain procedure, in a certain way.
LUCIANO BERIO
interview with Bruce Duffie
Hark to the music! How beneath the strain
Of reckless revelry, vibrates and sobs
One fundamental chord of constant pain,
The pulse-beat of the poet's heart that throbs.
EMMA LAZARUS
"Chopin"
Darwin's theory that music had its origin "in the sounds made by the half-human progenitors of man during the season of courtship" seems for many reasons to be inadequate and untenable. A much more plausible explanation, it seems to me, is to be found in the theory of Theophrastus, in which the origin of music is attributed to the whole range of human emotion.
EDWARD MACDOWELL
"The Origin of Music", Critical and Historical Essays
What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.
KEN LIVINGSTONE
interview, The Quietus, September 23, 2010
Not only is music a beautiful and sublime science, the study of which ennobles and purifies the mind of its votary, but how many and excellent are its ministries to others!
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Wor
Music is the universal language of mankind -- poetry their universal pastime and delight.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Outre-Mer
Articulating the connection between music and the outer world remains devilishly difficult. Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history.
ALEX ROSS
preface, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
It was by music that the ancient kings gave elegant expression to their joy. By their armies and axes they gave the same to their anger.
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius
I hear music
Mighty fine music,
The murmur of a morning breeze up there
The rattle of the milkman on the stair
Sure that's music...
FRANK LOESSER
"I Hear 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