Thursday, April 19, 2012

Quotables

It's been said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. I disagree. And so do all these people.

“Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” - Sergei Rachmanioff
"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... will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.”  - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"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

"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

"If I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn't play like Wynton. - Chet Baker
"My advice to you concerning applause is this: enjoy it but never quite believe it." - Samuel Beckett
"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

"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living." - Kirke Mecham

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

"Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz." - Louie Armstrong

"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 Hunegar

"Sometime you have to play a long time in order to play like yourself." - Miles Davis

"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

"Over all, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe... That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music."- John Coltrane

"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

"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 himself 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

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

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