1,882 Music Quotes

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn't interest me too much.

Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

I think the original, 'They're the next Jane's Addiction' things that people said about us in the beginning have been pretty much wiped out.

The Smashing Pumpkins was never meant to be a small band. It was going to either be a big band, or a no band.

We have a problem with any labels that people try to hang on us, because all it does is drag you down.

About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.

Music is 99% of my life. But I know I need a break. Besides, if you give people too much, they start to not want it. We need to restrain ourselves.

The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it's a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too.

Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre.

I love the development of our music, that's what I really dig about the whole thing. How we've tried to develop, y'know? It grows. That's why every day people come forward with new songs. Music goes on forever.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

The piano is always true to me. In times of despair, happiness, and joy, its mood is always my own.

I am a composer first and foremost, and have always believed that being able to write memorable melodies is what sets musicians apart. My songs bring images to the listener's mind. The object is to transport my listeners to another place, some place sacred and spiritual that will make them glad they took the ride.

All the information you need is available to you to have a successful career in music, if you're paying attention, and not closed off to anything. Remember, Perseverance is King.

A lot of musicians don't learn the business. You just have to be well-rounded in both areas. You have to understand publishing. You have to understand how you make money, what's in demand, what helps you make the most out of your talent.

This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for.

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

We're here to re-dedicate you to The Power, The Passion, The Mystery, and The Ministry of Rock and Roll.

The street's alive as secret debts are paid, Contacts made, they vanished unseen. Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades Hustling for the record machine. The hungry and the hunted explode into rock'n'roll bands That face off against each other out in the street, down in Jungleland.

The first day I can remember looking into a mirror and being able to stand what I saw was the day I had a guitar in my hand.

Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.

I always wanted to be a rock star. That was my childhood dream. That's what I told everybody I was going to be when I grew up.

Remember when we was young, everybody used to have these arguments about who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince? Prince won!

As you get older you will gain a bit more control over everything. Don't let anyone, even your parents, break you. Find good people who care about you and surround yourself with just them. If you can't find them at first, find good music and fall into it, let it hold you until they come. I truly hope you enjoy the new record.

We're pretty! We are though, we're a good-looking band.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.

Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

What are you thinking when you see Pete Doherty self-destruct? - He's such an intelligent man. I completely understand, I just understand.

I think I felt a bit trapped before I met Pete. Have you seen The Lavender Hill Mob? Alec Guinness plays this wonderful, colourful person who locks it all up and goes through the motions. I always felt a bit like that. But then I met the Pigman and he said, 'You can actually knock that on the head and get out.' So we threw ourselves into eternity. And it worked.

He's a sweet kid, I've met him a few times. He's not the genius everyone makes him out to be. In fact, far from a genius if his new album's anything to go by. He'll go down in history as a Morrissey and Marr or Lennon and McCartney type character. Him and Carl were great for each other. Apart they'll probably be shocking. There's a lot of hypocrisy in the British press about drugs. The people who write the stories are usually off their heads on cocaine anyway.

I immediately fell for him; not only as a musician and poet - he has a rare grace, as well.

Music is something that makes you feel, makes you think, and if you're really lucky, it makes you move.

Just as I was starting on my journey the idea came to me for a new symphony, this time with a program, but a program which will remain an enigma to all- let them guess it who can. It will be called 'A Programmatic Symphony' (No. 6). During my trip, while composing in my mind, I frequently shed tears. When I got home I settled down to sketch it, and the work went so furiously that I had the first movement completely ready in less than four days and the remaining movements are already clearly outlined in my head. Half the third movement is already done. There will be much innovation of form in this symphony- and incidentally, the finale will not be a noisy allegro but, on the contrary, a long drawn-out adagio. You can't imagine what bliss I feel, being convinced that my time is not yet passed and I can still work. Perhaps, of course, I'm mistaken, but I don't think so.

Delibes' rich score for Sylvia led Tchaikovsky to declare that Swan Lake was 'poor stuff in comparison'.

I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuschia drenched with rain.

Tanya, ain't such thing as a black country-western singer.

Blues is rap, just singing it.

'I love to sing. With this album, I'm just trying to be who I really am. This is my time.'

'Though acting came first, I love to sing,'

'I didn't want to be limited to just one genre.'

'I asked the label executives, 'Why can't I sing everything?''

'With my earlier albums, I was too young to understand that the writing is the most important part of expressing yourself. With this album I get the chance to express what I have to say.'

Scratching on the turntables! I mean, Whiskers was like 'mickehmickehmeowmickehmickehmeow!'

You spend months and months listening to the music, absorbing, practicing, working with real musicians who worked with them and getting as much of that as you can. And then the day you start shooting, you have to throw it all away. Because, they had no self-consciousness. They were natural performers and at that time, it wasn't about how you could synthesize a voice and make it appealing, it was about the natural little hiccups and the way you related a story or wrote the soul in the words you wrote. And 90% of your popularity was your performance and your interpretation of your own song. So, once we learned it all you just have to just kind of hope it all sunk in somewhere and just let it all go, cause they just had incredible confidence.

If music and sweet poetry agree. As they must needs (the sister and the brother), Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me, Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.

On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion's mane and shake at us... It's as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.

Bad is not sleazy. Bad has its own term to every individual and in my case it just means I've gotten a little rebellious on the album, broken out of my shell and I'm taking risks... Michael Jackson 'bad' kind of way. (about her Good Girl Gone Bad album)

I used to listen to a lot of reggae music and when I move to America, I was exposed to different types of music. It made me want to try everything and that's why my songs now are a fusion of so much.

My sound is really a fusion of reggae, hip-hop and R&B, with a little something different thrown in.

I would sing in the mirror, holding a brush to my mouth like it was a microphone. The neighbors would always be complaining about how loud I was singing.

When I was younger I took jazz, but the teacher yelled at me and I never went back, ever again!

The audition definitely went well. They (Def Jam) locked me into the office - till 3am. And Jay Z said, 'There's only two ways out. Out the door after you sign this deal. Or through this window...' and we were on the 29th floor. Very flattering.

New Song rapidly accumulated a nucleus of talent, and its best-known group was Els Setze Jutges, The Sixteen Judges, whose odd-sounding name came from a phrase used as a password by Catalan patriot troops during the rising against and occupation army in 1640 during the Reapers' War: 'Setze jutges d'un jutjat menjen fetge d'un penjat' ('Sixteen judges on a tribunal eat the liver of a hanged man'). No lisping Castilian, it was believed, could pronounce this barrage of fricatives.

Pretty soon it'll be so bad you'll be hearing something like. 'I built this cruise missile to stop those damn kids from playin' ZZ Top.'

With whisper of her mellowing grain, With treble of brook and bud and tree, Earth joys for ever to sustain The bass eternal of the sea.

Rufus Wainwright: Did you see that there's a chiropractor here?

Kurt Cobain died of a drug-induced suicide, I just - he was a worthless shred of human debris.

When you listen to Mozart, the silence that follows is still Mozart.

Dr. Johnson was observed by a musical friend of his to be extremely inattentive at a concert, whilst a celebrated solo player was running up and down the divisions and subdivisions of notes upon his violin. His friend, to induce him to take greater notice of what was going on, told him how extremely difficult it was. 'Difficult, do you call it, Sir?' replied the Doctor; 'I wish it were impossible.'

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon.

The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves.

'Love music. Love racism.'

Hello, 50 Cent here. People say my music is gratuitously violent and misogynistic - but what they don't realise is that I'm just talking about where I'm from. And where I'm from, everybody's a vile millionaire rapper and all woman are rubbish sluts.

I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of a horse. It is my temper, & I like it the better, to affect all harmony, and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.

Happy are they that go to bed with grave music.

Oh I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee, I'm going to Louisiana, my true love for to see It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry The sun so hot I froze to death; Susanna, don't you cry. Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me For I come from Alabama, With my banjo on my knee.

The day goes by like a shadow o'er the heart, With sorrow where all was delight; The time has come when the darkies have to part: Then my old Kentucky home, good night!

Without question, Steve is the best Broadway lyricist, past or present.

The ice cream truck in my neighborhood plays Helter Skelter.

Melody comes from rhythm.

'If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment--twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it wihout finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.'

Asked if he had ever conducted any Stockhausen, he said, 'No, but I once trod in some.'

If I cannot sing a work, I cannot conduct it.

No composer has written as much as 100 bars of worthwhile music since 1925.

After conducting an orchestra through a piece of music - 'Bass Trombone, you are out of tune.' [a voice comes from the orchestra saying] 'Sir, the bass trombonist hasn't arrived yet.' [To which Beecham replied] 'Oh... well when he arrives, tell him he's out of tune.'

On a grave stone is written: 'Here lies a fantastic organist and an excellent musician.' [Beecham then comments...] 'What, both in the same grave?'

Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

The harp that once through Tara's Hall The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara's wall As if that soul were fled.

The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone In the ranks of death you will find him His father's sword he hath girded on And his wild harp slung behind him.

They shouldn't even be considered. I don't know, man, they got a couple of hit songs, a catchy groove, great beat, I give them a 0.

I have nightmares about Metallica.

An act like ours wouldn't even be around today if someone hadn't brought us along and let us make mistakes and grow at our own pace. Today it seems that if you don't have a hit - or even if you do - they have no use for you the next time.

I'm frustrated by what I hear. Maybe it's not meant for me. Personally, I'm way too bright for a lot of the hip-hop lyrics to affect. I'm much too smart to think that jewelry or how cool I am is really going to change much about my personality. If you're dumb enough that it entertains you, have a great time. But I am seeking more than that.

There was Rock 'N' Roll across the dial. When I think of her, it makes me smile.

Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon.