MUSIC QUOTES II
quotations about music
For music, I must think, was given
To be of higher life a token,
The language by the angels spoken,
The native tongue of heaven!
CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH
"The Music of Nature"
He plays difficult music, but it does not appear to be so; indeed, it seems as if one could easily do the same, and this is real talent.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
letter to Leopold Mozart, Nov. 22, 1777
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.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
Where words fail, music speaks.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
"The Writing on the Wall"
We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
Comparison with bird-song, conceived as an element in sexual display, give rise to the suggestion that music might have emerged through the process of sexual selection. Maybe by singing and dancing a man testifies to his reproductive fitness, and so conquers the female heart, or at any rate the female genes. Or maybe through music people spontaneously "move with" other tribal members, reinforcing the impulse towards altruistic cooperation. Or perhaps music originates in the lullaby--the sing-song with which mother and child seal the bond between them, so increasing the chances that the child will survive. Take any feature of music, boil it down until it is all but indistinguishable from a feature of animal noise, rewrite both in Darwinese and--hey presto--you have a perfectly formed functional explanation of the musical life.
ROGER SCRUTON
Understanding Music
Who hears music feels his solitude
Peopled at once.
ROBERT BROWNING
Balaustion's Adventure
Music is a science that teaches how sound, under certain measures of time and tune, may be produced, and so ordered and disposed, as, either in consonance, or succession, or both, they may raise various sensations from the height of rapture even to melancholy or distraction.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
If we consider Music merely as an entertainment, doubtless, the author of all good designed the pleasing harmony and melody of sounds (among other purposes) to heighten the innocent pleasures of human life, and to alleviate and dispel its cares. When we are oppressed with sorrow and grief, it can enliven and exhilerate our drooping spirits. When we are elated, and as it were intoxicated with excessive joy, (for joy may be excessive and even dangerous) it can moderate the violence of the passions, bring us down from the giddy height, and reduce us to a state of tranquility: If inflamed with anger, or boiling with rage, it can soften us into pity, or melt us into compassion. In a word, hatred, malice, envy, and all the hideous group of infernal passions, which are at once the torment and disgrace of humanity, flee before this powerful charmer.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
When an animal utters a cry of joy or pain it expresses its emotions in more or less definite tones; and at some remote period of the earth's history all primeval mankind must have expressed its emotions in much the same manner. When this inarticulate speech developed into the use of certain sounds as symbols for emotions--emotions that otherwise would have been expressed by the natural sounds occasioned by them--then we have the beginnings of speech as distinguished from music, which is still the universal language. In other words, intellectual development begins with articulate speech, leaving music for the expression of the emotions.
EDWARD MACDOWELL
"The Origin of Music", Critical and Historical Essays
Music is always migrating from its point of origin to its destiny in someone's fleeting moment of experience.
ALEX ROSS
preface, The Rest Is Noise
Music is the link between earth and heaven.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
JEAN COCTEAU
Le Coq et l'Arlequin
Every man is full of music; but it is not every man that knows how to bring it out.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
O Music! language of the soul,
Of love, of God to man;
Bright beam from heaven thrilling,
That lightens sorrow's weight.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Apostrophe," Imogen and Other Poems
The field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
In music, as I find myself forever saying, things don't get better or worse: they evolve and transform themselves.
LUCIANO BERIO
Beszélgetések Luciano Berióval
When time itself shall be no more / And all things in confusion hurl'd / Music shall then exert it's power / And sound survive the ruins of the world / Then saints and angels shall agree / In one eternal jubilee / All Heaven shall echo with their hymns divine / And God himself with pleasure see / The whole creation in a chorus join.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Song for St. Cecilia's Day
Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.
HERBERT SPENCER
Facts and Comments
The inner nature of man is the province of music.
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius