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Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. - Charlie Parker The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen. - Duke Ellington In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time. - Charles Mingus You can't make your music good. You can't try to be good. You can try to be present and you can try to remain open so what is going to speak to you can speak through you. - Michael Hedges Let us sort the music from the sound. - Michael Stipe of REM Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside you, and take some of you with it when it leaves. - Henry Threadgill The music has generated all the techniques I use. When I sit down to learn to play something . . . it is not because I want to master a technique. It is because I want to hear what an idea sounds like. - Pat Martino
I don't think you can ever do your best. Doing your best is a process of trying to do your best. - Townes Van Zandt Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form. - Plato What we play is life. - Louis Armstrong Music has charms to soothe a savage beast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. - William Congreve If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterwards. - Joe Pass Not everyone is going to like what I do, and that's something I can accept. If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn't be playing anything of depth. - Joshua Redman I like to play with people who can play simple and are not threatened by other musicians thinking they can't play. And that eliminates 99 percent of the musicians. - Neil Young If I can get out of the way, if I can be pure enough, and if I can be generous and loving and caring enough to abandon what I have and my own preconceived, silly notions of what I think I am - and become truly who in fact I am - then the music can really use me. And therein lies my fulfillment. That's when the music starts to happen. - John McLaughlin How you play a note is just as important as what the note is. - Henry Kaiser I don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would never have written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker would never have played anything but swing music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and say, this is what I have to do. - Brandford Marsalis Whether you're playing in a bar, a strip joint, or the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to compliment and enhance life. - Carlos Santana If you are able to discover your own keynote or chord and play it over gently to yourself, you will revive as if by magic. Your keynote can be ascertained by listening to some good music. When the note is played it will send a thrill right through you. - Vera Stanley Alder The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication. - Oliver Sacks "Awakenings" When I hear music I fear no danger. I am invulnerable I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest. -Thoreau JOURNAL 1857 Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul. -Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky Music can be all things to all persons. It is like a great dynamic sun in the center of a solar system which sends out its rays and inspiration in every direction.... Music makes us feel that the heavens open and a divine voice calls. Something in our souls responds and understands. - Leopold Stokowski The heart at the center of the universe with every throb hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, vein and veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated with tides of joy. The plenty of the poorest place is too great; the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound ends in music. The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays. - Ralph Waldo Emerson It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristic. - James Weldon Johnson If music be the food of love, play on. - William Shakespeare Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease; and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord. - Plutarch There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent. - Montaigne After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. - Aldous Huxley
Music is the universal language of mankind. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 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 Without music life would be a mistake. - Friedrich Nietzsche Beethoven can
write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth. You are the music while the music lasts. - T. S. Eliot The history of a people is found in its songs. - George Jellinek Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. - Confucius A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. - Leopole Stokowski Music is the eye of the ear - Thomas Draxe We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. - Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, 1962 |
