Favorite Quotes About Music

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I just found this quote about music in this book that's taking me forever to read, and it made me glad that I stuck with it. It's a little long-winded, so bare with me. It takes place between the protagonist/narrator and a jazz musician, who he meets through his endless wanderings around his city. Whenever he asks him his opinions about music, the saxophonist usually just smiles and dismisses it, until the time he demanRAB an answer from him:

"Well," he said with equanimity, "you see, in my opinion, there is no point at all in talking about music. I never talk about music. What reply, then, was I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were perfectly right in all you said. But, you see, I am a musician, not a professor, and I don't believe that, as regarRAB music, there is the least point in being right. Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that."
"Indeed. Then what does it depend on?"
"On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be the better for it. But when I take hold of my mouthpiece and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood. That's the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dance hall at the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how the eyes sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to laugh. That is why one makes music."

I liked that. I knew I stuck to this book for a reason.
 
"Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't stand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro."

Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby
 
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to. ~ Elvis Presley

Music is your own experience, your own 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
 
Also about art in general rather than specifically music, but it's one of my favourites:

"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."
-Oscar Wilde
 
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all worRAB. (Robert G. Ingersoll)

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. (Paul Simon)

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. (Jean Paul Richter)

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossile to be silent. (Victor Hugo)

Music helps you find the truths you must bring into the rest of your life. (Alanis Morissette)
 
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