Quotes by musicians about music

Subject: Quotes by musicians about music
From: GUEST,Wesley S
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 09:31 AM

Here's a rather extensive collection of quotes - it was sent to me by a friend of mine who actually makes a living playing music. I'm not sure where he found it - but there are some interesting ideas here.



"One of the perks of being an unemployed musician is that you get to play much less bad music."
Jack Daney

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
Aldous Huxley

"Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself."
Igor Stravinsky

"Hell is full of musical amateurs."
George Bernard Shaw

"The drummer drives. Everybody else rides!"
Panama Francis
   
"Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins."
Dizzy Gillespie on playing the trumpet

"Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one."
Duke Ellington

"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time."
Ornette Coleman
   
"We never play anything the same way once."
Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians

"Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't."
Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman

"Music is a very hard instrument."
Vido Musso

"The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'"
unknown-talking about the Don Ellis band

"If I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn't play like Wynton.
Chet Baker

"I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gon' keep playin'.
Clark Terry

"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves."
Herbie Hancock

"To be a musician is a curse. To NOT be one is even worse.
Jack Daney

"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already."
Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve."
Xavier Cugat

"[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art."
Jean! Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.

"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living."    Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer

"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet."
Niccoló Paganini

"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?"
Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats."
Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan.

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."
Oscar Wilde

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together."
Mel Brooks

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years."
William F. Buckley, Jr.

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow."
Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Mark Twain

"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently."
James Gibbons Hunekar

"If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder."
Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."
Sergei Prokofiev

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?"
Dimitri Mitropolous

"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way."
Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

"Already too loud!"
Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments.

"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere."
Frederic Chopin

"When she started to play, Steinway himse! lf came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano."
Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
    Richard Strauss

"In opera, there is always too much singing."
Claude Debussy

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!"
Giacchino Rossini

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that has made giant strides in reverse."
Bing Crosby

"A ponderous orchestral absurdity."
Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic

"The bottom line of any country is, what did we contribute to the world? We (the U.S.) contributed Louis Armstrong."
Tony Bennett

"If you make a mistake, play it twice, the audience will think it's part of the song!"    Quincy Jones

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 10:10 AM

"Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness. I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness."   
Aaron Copland

"Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart." Andre Segovia

"Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music."    Jimi Hendrix

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: number 6
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 10:17 AM

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do. "

........Woody Guthrie

Guest ... thanks for that quote by Aaron Copeland. Very good.

sIx

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 10:23 AM

In referring to his close friend and many-time Downbeat Jazz Guitarist of the year, Tal Farlow:

"A musician's style is the summation of his limitations."

Sal Salvadore (a fine jazz guitarits in his own right, who was with the Stan Kenton band and had his own quartet.)

Jerry

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: number 6
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 10:26 AM

here's some from one of my favourite composers/musicians Thelonius Monk.

"All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians. "

"All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around. "

"I played the wrong, wrong notes"


sIx

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 11:07 AM

One of my favourites by Kay Russell - musical collaborator with Susan Fassbender:-
The only nice thing about the music business is the music.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 11:10 AM

Also one by John Williams

Electric guitar playing is all about how the note sustains, acoustic guitar playing is about how it decays and dies.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Once Famous
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 11:21 AM

Quoted by virtually any country picker:

"If you don't like Hank Williams, you can just kiss my ass."


Quoted by old stalwart bluegrass players who are extremely rigid:

"That ain't the way Bill played it."

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Mark Ross
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 11:42 AM

"The first time, it's a mistake, the 2nd, a new arrangement, the 3rd time, it's jazz.

David Amram



Mark Ross

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Midchuck
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 11:59 AM

...you can always play "Wildwood Flower". A lot of normal people can't play "Wildwood Flower" and no matter how bad we get, we've always got that.

- Bryan Kimsey, of New Mexico, on the Flatpick-l list, consoling another member who was dissatisfied with his progress.

I voted for that as "quote of the year" on that list.

Peter.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: GUEST,DannyC
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 01:26 PM

Got this one second hand:

Attributed to Larry Nugent - Terrific Trad Flute Player - Fermanagh/Chicago - on much-too-early Alaska radio in weary response to the weary question, "Why do you play the music?"

"It releases me from the tyranny of the conscious mind."

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Leadfingers
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 02:03 PM

Two answers to "Do you Read Music?"

First , Louis Armstrong when he was doing the Solo Virtuoso bit with Big Bands in the later thirties

"Not enough to hurt my playing"

And a Blues Guitarist who's name I have lost !

" Hell , man , You dont READ Music , you just PLAY it"

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Tootler
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 04:09 PM

Kathryn Tickell explaining the title of one of her compositions during a concert

"Music is all about moving air"

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 08:15 PM

"Music is too important to be left to the professionals."

From Michelle Shocked, though I have no idea if it was hers originally or if she borrowed it.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Peace
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 08:18 PM

Music hath charm to soothe the savage breast, but not as much as Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69".

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Beer
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 08:34 PM

Yes Guest, thank you also for the Andre Segovia quote.

Here is one I always loved but I don't have a clue who said it. Maybe someone out there would know. "Music should be a free gift for all who care to pause and listen".

Three names also come to mind who must have some great things to say.
1) Bob Dylan
2) Kris Kristofferson
3) John Prine

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Ron Davies
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 11:34 PM

Brahms--"The metronome has no value. I have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go well together".

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Ron Davies
Date: 30 Dec 05 - 11:36 PM

(Could also be translated, I suspect, as "my spirit"--haven't seen the original German.)

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: John O'L
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 12:30 AM

"Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre."
Chet Atkins

"I only know two pieces; one is 'Clair de la Lune' and the other one isn't."
Victor Borge

"After about three lessons the voice teacher said, 'Don't take voice lessons. Do it your way.'"
Johnny Cash

"Do not fear mistakes. There are none."
Miles Davis

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Peace
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 12:34 AM

"I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I'm about to get."

Bo Diddley

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: John O'L
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 12:36 AM

"In the world Miles inhabits, perhaps. In my world there are mistakes"
John O'Lennaine

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Peace
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 12:39 AM

"There are more bad musicians than there is bad music."

Isaac Stern

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: number 6
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 12:48 AM

I have always liked John Lennon's statement after completing their last performance together as a group on the rooftop of Apple.

""I'd like to say thanks on behalf of the group - and I hope we passed the audition."

sIx

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Tootler
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 04:19 PM

If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me surfeit of it, that the appetite may sicken and so, die.

William Shakespeare
Twelth Night

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: *daylia*
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 04:23 PM

"I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings."
   
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Bill D
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 06:21 PM

"Why, 'hit don't make no sense...they're just singin' about air!." ....old woman from a little country music band, after listening to some modern pop music.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: pdq
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 07:05 PM

Somebody said "I'd love to be able to play the banjo like Earl Scruggs. Then not."

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: GUEST,wordy
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 08:14 PM

"I wish I'd written that" (Me)

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Celtaddict
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 08:30 PM

"There are just two kinds of American music.
Zippidy-Doo-Dah, and everything else."
Townes Van Zandt

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: GUEST,Townesaddict
Date: 31 Dec 05 - 10:16 PM

Think the Townes quote was
"...there's the blues, and then there's Zippidy-Doo-Dah".

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Pauline L
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 12:19 AM

Thanks, Ron. That's exactly the way I feel about metronomes.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Pauline L
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 12:25 AM

English Act of Parliament, 1642: "If any person or persons, commonly called Fidlers or Minstrels, shall be taken playing, fidling, or making music, in any Inn, Alehouse, or Tavern, or shall be taken intreating any person to hear them play, that every such person shall be adjudged rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and be punished as such."

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Kaleea
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 03:41 AM

"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."
                . . . Count Basie

"It don't mean a thang if it ain't got that Western Swang."
                . . . Bob Wills

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: AllisonA(Animaterra)
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 07:12 AM

"Music expresses what cannot be put into words,
and yet cannot remain unsaid"

Victor Hugo

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Tootler
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 07:17 AM

Well Pauline L, does that mean that anyone who participates in a pub session is a "Rogue, Vagabond and Sturdy Beggar?"

I am sure there are many licensing authorities who will be pleased to hear this. <vbg>

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: van lingle
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 08:32 AM

Another answer to the "Can you read music?" question I read somewhere recently goes something like:
Yeah, I can but when I do I can't hear the music in my head.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: kendall
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 08:37 AM

pdq, I believe it was Frank Profitt who said that.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 09:17 AM

"Another answer to the "Can you read music?" question I read somewhere recently goes something like:
Yeah, I can but when I do I can't hear the music in my head."

Practice, practice, practice. Practice builds connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and also between the eyes, brain, heart and hands.

ANd for a sense of timing that can't be beat under any musical circumstance, practice with a metronome.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Ron Davies
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 10:10 AM

Thanks Pauline.





May be apocryphal--


Sir Thomas Beecham, to question as to whether he'd ever conducted any Stockhausen:

"No, but I believe I once trod in some."

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: pdq
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 11:04 AM

Somebody said "Donald Trump is so rich he has the real Kenny G playing in his elevator!"

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: *daylia*
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 11:17 AM

"It's a shame when people reject the best traditions and practices of the world's most talented, artists, in favor of music that is the most amateurish and least sophisticated. In few other areas of human activity do people reject the best and prefer the worst. Not many people would prefer to watch sporting events featuring the most poorly trained and least accomplished athletes, or buy clothes designed and crafted by amateurs in a folksy, homespun style; prefer that a complicated surgical procedure be performed by a self-taught physician, or trust their financial futures in a civil suit to a untrained "garage" attorney. Strangely, when it comes to music, it seems for some otherwise intelligent, educated adults, the cruder the better. Go figure."

Mickie Willis, composer and jazz pianist, Louisiana

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 02:01 PM

"Music is decorating time with sound."

--John Knowles

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 05:35 PM

from jerry reed on hearing paul Macartney was going back on the road

If I was paul MacCartney, I'd buy the road......

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: pdq
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 06:39 PM

Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
~ Frank Zappa

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.
~ Frank Zappa

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
~ Frank Zappa

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
~ Frank Zappa

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.
~ Frank Zappa

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
~ Frank Zappa

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.
~ Frank Zappa

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another. You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
~ Frank Zappa

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: pdq
Date: 01 Jan 06 - 08:40 PM

...ooops...the last two should read:

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.
~ Frank Zappa

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
~ Frank Zappa

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 02 Jan 06 - 06:18 AM

Frank Zappa was so weird you wondered if maybe he was right and the rest of us were all wrong. I suppose in ourselves we all contain an alternative universe.

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: *daylia*
Date: 02 Jan 06 - 06:43 AM

"I don't know anything about music. In my line, you don't have to."

Elvis Presley

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 02 Jan 06 - 06:56 AM

Definition of Jazz

"Knowing all the notes of a tune, and then, playing all the other ones"

Did I think of that one, or was it overheard once??

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: Tootler
Date: 02 Jan 06 - 01:17 PM

Alistair Anderson at a workshop earlier this year.

"If you're going to play a wrong note, don't be timid about it. Play it loud and with confidence!"

Subject: RE: Quotes by musicians about music
From: number 6
Date: 02 Jan 06 - 01:34 PM

Bravo !! I like that .. thanks Tootler.

sIx