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Music is the
only sensual pleasure without vice.
Sanuel Johnson
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You
can play Bach on the piano, a symphony
orchestra or a quartet of saxophones,
but
let’s stop this silly, childish
business of knit your own musicology
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| If I had the
power, I would insist on all oratorios being sung in the costume of the
period, with the possible exception of The Creation. Ernest Newman |
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Why waste money
on psychotherapy when you
can listen to the B Minor Mass?
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I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would
be boasting.
Lewis Thomas
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If you remove
tone from music, you
have something, but what? I find it difficult to call it music.
Tamás
Vásáry
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Bach opens a
vista to the universe. After
experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.
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Music is the
shorthand of emotion.
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Music is
moonlight in the gloomy night of
life.
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Music has its
own internal logic. It
is like the logic of a dream, clear in its own terms but not
necessarily in everyday terms.
Sometimes it
expresses something you
can describe in words, but not always.
Tamás Vásáry
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If anyone has
conducted a Beethoven
performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's
something wrong.
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Music is an
outburst of the soul.
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| It occurred to
me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition.
My discovery (the theory of relativity) was the result of musical
perception. Albert Einstein |
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No good opera
plot can be sensible, for
people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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| The English
don't really like music, but they simply adore the noise it makes. Sir Thomas Beecham |
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Anything that is
too stupid to be said, is sung.
François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
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Without
music, life
would be a mistake. The German imagines even God singing songs.
Friedrich
Nietzsche
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He who sings,
prays twice.
St Augustine
of
Hippo
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In the end we
shall have
had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to
live
more musically.
Vincent van
Gogh
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Music that is
born complex
is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.
Aaron Copland
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Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to
ballet. |
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I’ve learned
what ‘classical’
means. It means something that sings and dances through sheer joy of
existence.
Gustav Holst
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My personal
hobbies are
reading, listening to music and silence.
Edith Sitwell
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After silence,
that which
comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
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Music is a
higher revelation
than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which
the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
Ludwig van
Beethoven
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God respects
me when I
work, but He loves me when I sing.
Rabindranath
Tagore
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| Text first,
rhythm second, melody third. Claudio Monteverdi |
| Music rots when
it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too
far from music. Ezra Pound |
| A musician
cannot move others unless he, too, is moved. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach |
| He who hears
music, feels his solitude peopled at once. Robert Browning |
| What is best in
music is not to be found in the notes. Gustav Mahler |
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Composers and
musicians have always starved and, as this is a sentimental country, we
think the tradition should be continued. Sir Thomas Beecham
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The man that hath no
music in himself Nor is not move'd with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit
for treasons , strategems, and spoils;
The motions of his
spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no
such man be trusted.
William Shakespeare
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An intellectual
is someone who can listen to the William
Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.
John Chesson
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Musical
compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain
countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues.
The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. Henri Rabaud
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| Music with
dinner is an insult to both cook and violinist. Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
| There is 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 |
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Learning music
by reading
about it is like making love by mail.
Luciano
Pavarotti
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Music is a
moral law.
It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the
imagination,
a charm to sadness and a gaiety and life to everything. It is the
essence of order and leads to all that is good, true and beautiful, of which it is the invisible but nevertheless dazzling,
passionate and eternal form.
Plato
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Music is the
art of the
prophets.
Martin Luther
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Music is love
in search
of a word.
Sidney Lanier
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Music is
revelation; a
revelation loftier than all wisdom and all philosophy.
Ludwig van Beethoven |
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The
music is in the air. Take as much as you want.
Sir
Edward Elgar
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| Never look at
the trombones. It only encourages them. Richard Strauss |
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Music is the
universal
language of mankind.
Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow
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Music produces
a kind
of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.
K'ung-fu-tzu
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| Wagner did not
like the saxophone. He said it sounds like the word
Reckankreuzungsklankwerkzeuge. Nicolas Slonimsky |
| What every true
artist wants, really wants, is to be paid. Terry Pratchett |
| Musicians talk
of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They
really are interested in music and art Jean Sibelius |
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Coleman
Hawkins
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I would teach
children
music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music,
for in the
patterns of
music and all the arts are the keys of learning.
Plato
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There are two
golden rules
for an orchestra: start together and finish together
The public
doesn't give
a damn what goes on in between.
Sir Thomas
Beecham
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It is cruel,
you know,
that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty
of
loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of
disappointment
and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty
of nature,
and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin
Britten
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Music is well
said to
be the speech of angels. In fact, nothing
among
the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine.
It brings us near
to
the infinite.
Thomas Carlyle
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The high note
is not the
only thing.
Placido
Domingo
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Music was
invented to
confirm human loneliness.
Lawrence
Durrell
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The effects of
good music
are not just because it's new. On the contrary
music
strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.
Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
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The music
teacher came
every week, to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin.
Unknown
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They tell me
Wagner's
music is better than it sounds.
Edgar Wilson
"Bill" Nye (1850-1896) as quoted by Mark Twain
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Music heard so
deeply
that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music
lasts
Thomas
Stearns Eliot
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Do you know
that our soul
is composed of harmony?
Leonardo da
Vinci
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I think I
should have
no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.
It seems to
infuse strength
into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go
on without
effort, when I am filled with music.
George Eliot
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Music
ministers to human
welfare more than any other art.
Herbert
Spencer
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Music is the
flowering
of character.
K'ung-fu-tzu
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I haven't
understood a
bar of music in my life, but I've felt it.
Igor
Stravinski
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Music
expresses that which
can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent
Victor Hugo
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Don't play the
notes.
Play the meaning of the notes.
Pablo Casals
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Music for a long
time has been telling what the world is like. What music has to say
now, in a manner that has both logic and emotion in it, is that the
world has a structure persons could like; be stronger by.... [If] the
world is the oneness of opposites -- and music says it is -- the world
is given an everlastingly sensible basis; for what could be more
sensible that to be calm and forceful at once, reposeful and intense at
once?
Eli Siegel
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There is not one
thing that music does which does not say something about how a person
should organize himself, too.
Eli Siegel
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