I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.
- Igor Stravinsky
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
- Noel Coward
All music is folk music; I ain't never heard no horse sing a song.
- Louis Armstrong
Every mistake is a new style.
- Alhaji Ibrahim Abdulai
Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.
- Rossini
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
- Voltaire
Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvellous misquotations.
- Ned Rorem
The flute is not an instrument with a good moral effect. It is too exciting.
- Aristotle
Where words leave off, music begins.
- Heine
I would like to play for audiences who are not using my music to stimulate their sex organs.
- Ornette Coleman
Guitarists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune.
- Anonymous Music Historian, Chiangmai
An oboe is an ill wind that nobody blows good.
- Bennett Cerf
Only sick music makes money today.
- Friedrich Nietzche, in 1888.
The amount of money one needs is terrifying...
- Ludwig van Beethoven
Conductors must give unmistakeable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.
- George Szell
He uses music as an accompaniment to conducting.
- Oscar Levant, on Leonard Bernstein
If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance , and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
- Simon Rattle
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers, and for two reasons. First, to discourage the composer from writing any more, and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
- Jascha Heifetz
Rock is really about dick and testosterone.
- Courtney Love
The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.
- Bennett Cerf
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak might be thinking up something else.
- Lily Tomlin
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
- Charles Beaudelaire
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
- Igor Stravinsky
Too many pieces of music finish too soon before the end.
- Peter Gore-Symes
Music rearranges your molecular structure.
- Carlos Santana
Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?
- William Shakespeare
There is delight in singing, though none hear it beside the singer.
- Walter Savage Landor
The guitar's alright as a hobby, but it won't earn you any money.
- John Lennon's Aunt Mimi, who bought him his first guitar.
Interviewer: What do you think of Beethoven?
Ringo Starr: Great. Especially his poems.
I never wanted to be famous, I only wanted to be great.
- Ray Charles
Art is the signature of civilisation.
- Beverley Sills
Musical innovation is full of danger to the state, for when modes of music change, the laws of the state always change with them.
- Plato
The rhythm of jazz is against the normal psychological needs of man.
- The Peoples Music Press, Peking, China.
Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
- Mel Brooks
Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.
- Isaac Stern
A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.
- Thomas Beecham
Mine was the kind of piece in which nobody knew what was going on, including the composer, the conductor, and the critics. Consequently I got pretty good reviews.
- Oscar Levant
The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.
- Dizzy Gillespie
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah - that is where the art resides.
- Artur Schnabel
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
- Scott Adams
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
- Kin Hubbard
An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.
- Dan Rather
Listening to a recording is like going to bed with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.
- Otto Klemperer
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
- Edgar Wilson Nye
My music is best understood by children and animals.
- Igor Stravinsky
I hate music, especially when it's played.
- Jimmy Durante
For discords make the sweetest airs.
- Samuel Butler
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
- Elvis Presley
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
- Johann Sebastian Bach
Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.
- Howard Dietz
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
- Aldous Huxley
There's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.
- Chuck Sigars
Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.
- Richard Strauss
Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
- Henry Louis Mencken
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
- Ed Gardner
Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.
- Frank Zappa
I'm saddest when I sing.
- Thomas Haynes Bayly
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
- Igor Stravinsky
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
- Igor Stravinsky
Hurry! I never hurry. I have no time to hurry.
- Igor Stravinsky
Art is making something better without knowing what better is until you make it.
- Darby Bannard
Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
- Laurie Anderson
Piano, /n./ A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by pressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.
- David Byrne
People who don't like classical music just don't listen to it loud enough.
- Mark Hahn
For people who live their lives in classical music the Three Tenors is a kind of benign tumor: unsightly but not life threatening.
- Bernard Holland
Never compose anything, unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you.
- Gustav Holst
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?
- Igor Stravinsky
Young man: Excuse me sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?
Pedestrian: Years of practice, my boy. Years of practice.
The majority of people who keel over dead at concerts are killed by a long trumpet passage.
- Garrison Keillor
What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.
- Gustav Mahler
Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.
- Ned Rorem
Directions on some of Erik Satie's piano pieces...
* To be played with both hands in the pocket
* Like a nightingale with a toothache
* Light as an egg
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
- Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music.
Fun music exam answers
The lead singer in nineteenth century opera was known as a pre-Madonna.
Gregorian chant has no music, just singers singing the same lines.
Sherbet composed the Unfinished Symphony.
All female parts were sung by Castrati. We don't know exactly what they sounded like because there are no known descendants.
Young scholars have expressed their rapture for the Bronze Lullaby, the Taco Bell Cannon, Beethoven's Erotica, Tchaikovsky Cracknutter Suite, and Gershwin's Rap City in Blue.
Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel; if they sing without music it is called Acapulco.
A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals.
Contralto is music that only low ladies sing.
Probably the most marvelous fugue was the one between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
I know what a sextet is but I'd rather not say.
Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic.
Rock Monanoff was a famous post-romantic composer of piano concerti.
Musical Terminology 101
Aformmagio: To play in a slow and cheesy manner. AnDante: A musical composition that is infernally slow. Angus Dei: To play with a divine beefy tone. Antiphonal: Referring to the prohibition of cell phones in the concert hall. A Patella: Unaccompanied knee-slapping. Appologgiatura: A composition, solo or instrument you regret playing. Approximatura: A series of notes played by a performer, not intended by the composer. Approximento: A musical entrance that is somewhere in the vicinity of the correct pitch. Bar Line: What musicians form after a concert. Concerto Grossissimo: A really bad performance. Coral Symphony: (See Beethoven’s Caribbean period) Fermantra: A note that is held over repeatedly. Frugalhorn: A sensible, inexpensive brass instrument. Gaul Blatter: A French horn player. Gregorian Champ: Monk who can hold a note the longest. Kvetchendo: Gradually getting annoyingly louder. Mallade: A romantic song that's pretty awful. Molto bolto : Head straight for the ending. Opera buffa: Musical stage production in the nude. Pre-Classical Conservatism: "If it ain't baroque,don't fix it. Sackbutt: rear view of the 300 lb. tuba player. Spritzicato: Plucking of a stringed instrument to produce a bright, bubbly sound. Tempo Tantrumo: When a young band refuses to keep time with the conductor. Tincanabulation: The irritating sounds made by extremely cheap bells. Vesuvioso: A gradual buildup to a fiery conclusion.
The Many Facets of artist Galen Garwood
Galen Garwood - The painting, print making (monotypes), collage, photography, multi-media, video and poetry of Galen Garwood.