"An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses, and keep up an indolent attention to the audience." ~ Joseph Addison Top of "A" section  ||  Top of page "Music is that which cannot be said but upon which it is impossible to be silent" ~ Anonymous, attributed to Victor Hugo Top of "A" section  ||  Top of page "Harpists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune." ~ Anonymous Top of "A" section  ||  Top of page "The flute is not an instrument with a good moral effect. It is too exciting." ~ Aristotle Top of "A" section  ||  Top of page "Music is the best means we have of digesting time." ~ W.H. Auden Top of "A" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "I was obliged to work hard. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed just as well." ~ Johann Sebastian Bach "Whereas the Honorable and Most Wise Council of this Town of Leipzig have engaged me as Cantor of the St. Thomas School... I shall set the boys a shining example... serve the school industriously... bring the music in both the principal churches of this town into good estate... faithfully instruct the boys not only in vocal but also in instrumental music... arrange the music so that it shall not last too long, and shall... not make an operatic impression, but rather incite the listeners to devotion... treat the boys in a friendly manner and with caution, but, in case they do not wish to obey, chastise them with moderation or report them to the proper place." ~ Johann Sebastian Bach On Bach: "Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian" ~ Roger Fry "Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the most beautiful, Rossini the most brilliant, but Bach is the most comprehensive: he has said all there is to say." ~ Charles Gounod Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Singing lieder is like putting a piece of music under the microscope." ~ Dame Janet Baker Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens to when I composer, I really haven"t the faintest idea." ~ Samuel Barber Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Today, conducting is a question of ego: a lot of people believe they are actually playing the music." ~ Daniel Barenboim Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Whether the angels play only Bach in praising God I am not quite sure: I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart." ~ Karl Barth Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page On Bartok: "If the reader were so rash as to purchase any of Bela Bartok's compositions, he would find that they each and all consist of unmeaning bunches of notes, apparently representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform or ears to listen too." ~ Frederick Corder Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "The women composers of today have advanced in technique, resourcefulness, and force, and even the younger composers have achieved some effects which the great masters themselves would never have dared to attempt. The present composers are getting away more and more from the idea that they must cater to the popular taste, and in expressing their individual ideas, are giving us music of real worth and beauty." ~ Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H.H.A. Beach) Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "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 Sir Thomas Beecham was once asked if he had played any Stockhausen. "No", he replied, "but I have trodden in some". ~ Sir Thomas Beecham "A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it." ~ Sir Thomas Beecham "The English do not like music but love the noise it makes." ~ Sir Thomas Beecham "Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away." ~ Sir Thomas Beecham "What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks jumping about." ~ Sir Thomas Beecham on Beethoven's Seventh Symphony "Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed." ~ Sir Thomas Beecham on Bruckner's Seventh Symphony Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Handel, to him I bow the knee." ~ Ludwig van Beethoven "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for men and makes them drunk with the spirit." ~ Ludwig van Beethoven "I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time... before writing them down... once I have grasped a theme. I shall not forget it even years later. I change many things, discard others, and try again and again until I am satisfied; then, in my head... [the work] rises, it grows, I hear and see the image n front of me from every angle... and only the labor of writing it down remains... I turn my ideas into tones that resound, roar, and rage until at last they stand before me in the form of notes." ~ Ludwig van Beethoven Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside. ~ Ludwig van Beethoven On his deathbed: "Strange, I feel as if up to now I had written no more than a few notes." ~ Ludwig van Beethoven "What I have in my heart and soul - must find a way out. That is the reason for music..." On Beethoven: "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. "Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer." ~ John Ruskin "If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation. ~ Tom Stoppard "What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks jumping about." ~ Sir Thomas Beecham on Beethoven's Seventh Symphony Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "It is the best of trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them." ~ Hillaire Belloc Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page On Berlin: "If a man, in a lifetime of 50 years, can point to six songs that are immediately identifiable, he has achieved something. Irving Berlin can sing 60 that are immediately identifiable. Somebody once said you couldn't have a holiday without his permission." ~ Sammy Cahn "Berlin's great secret is that he says exactly what he means; sometimes he hits a gigantic line both musically and lyrically -- almost Wagnerian in its strength." ~ Oscar Hammerstein II "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music. Emotionally, he honestly absorbs the vibrations emanating from the people, manners and life of his time and, in turn, gives these impressions back to the world -- simplified, clarified and glorified." ~ Jerome Kern "I don't know anyone who sits down to write a song hit except Irving Berlin. He can't help writing hits." ~ Cole Porter "America's music was born at his piano." ~ Isaac Stern Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "To render my works properly requires a combination of extreme precision and irresistible verve, a regulated vehemence, a dreamy tenderness, and an almost morbid melancholy." ~ Berlioz On Berlioz: Hector Berlioz was the "most baffling phenomenon in musical history" ~ J.H. Elliot Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Any composer's writing is the sum of himself, of all his roots and influences. I have deep roots, each different from one another...I can only hope it adds up to something you could call universal." ~ Leonard Bernstein Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "There are two instruments worse than a clarinet - two clarinets." ~ Ambrose Bierce Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "The sense of music is a primal thing in mankind, and a tremendous force, either for good or evil." ~ Sir Arthur Bliss Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Chamber music - a conversation between friends." ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "My things really are written with an appalling lack of practicality!" ~ Johannes Brahms "It is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table." ~ Johannes Brahms On Brahms: "A landscape, torn by mists and clouds, in which I can see ruins of old churches, as well as of Greek temples - that is Brahms." ~ Edvard Grieg Art is long and life is short; here is evidently the explanation of a Brahms symphony. ~ Edward Lorne "I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying "I don"t want to make a cemetery of your composition." ~ Hugo Wolf Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Composing is like driving down a foggy road ...." ~ Benjamin Britten Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page On Anton Bruckner: "In the first movement alone, I took note of six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages. ~ Frederick Corder "Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed." ~ Sir Thomas Beecham on Bruckner's Seventh Symphony Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Musick is a tonick to the saddened soul, a Roaring Meg against Melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul, affecting not only the ears, but the very arteries, the vital and animal spirits; it erects the mind, and makes it nimble." ~ Robert Burton Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page "Take it for granted from the beginning that everything is possible on the piano, even when it seems impossible to you, or really is so." ~ Ferruccio Busoni Top of "B" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing." ~ John Cage Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it had missed the point." ~ Maria Callas Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "Sibelius justified the austerity of his old age by saying that while other composers were engaged in manufacturing cocktails he offered the public pure cold water." ~ Neville Cardus Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "music is well said to be the speech of angels." ~ Thomas Carlyle Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "I am amazed at radio DJ's today. I am firmly convinced that AM on my radio stands for Absolute Moron. I will not begin to tell you what FM stands for." ~ Jasper Carrott Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page On Caruso: "In the glorious radiance of it's timbre, in the life-giving abundance of its tone, and in its plentitude and virility, his voice seemed something inexhaustible. The capacity for giving pleasure by Caruso was equaled by no other figure of his time in all the realm of music." ~ Irving Kolodin On Caruso: "The man was unique. There never was a sound like his: that heroic attack, that velvet suavity, that sheer, exultant joy in singing." ~ Harold C. Schonberg Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "An oboe is an ill-wind that nobody blows good." ~ Bennet Cerf Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars....Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit...I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man." ~ Frédéric Chopin "Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, except, possibly, two." ~ Frédéric Chopin "One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful sounds, to know how to play long notes and short notes and to [attain] certain unlimited dexterity... A well formed technique, it seems to me, [is one] that can control and vary a beautiful sound quality." ~ Frédéric Chopin Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "Enough of clouds, waves, acquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents; what we need is a music of the earth, everyday music...music one can live in like a house." ~ Jean Cocteau "Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer." ~ Jean Cocteau Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "Music is the art of thinking with sounds." ~ Jules Combarieu Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "The melody is generally what the piece is all about." ~ Aaron Copland "To explain the creative musician's basic objective in elementary terms, I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. These thoughts and emotions are gradually formed by the contact of the composer's personality with the world in which he lives. He expresses these thoughts (musical ones...) in the musical language of his own time. The resultant work of art should speak to men and women of the artist's own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give." ~ Aaron Copland "You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room - proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle." ~ Aaron Copland "The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No." ~ Aaron Copland Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." ~ Sir Noel Coward Top of "C" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony?" ~ Leonardo da Vinci Top of "D" section  ||  Top of page "I"ll play it first and tell you what it is later." ~Miles Davis Top of "D" section  ||  Top of page "You can't teach a young musician to compose any more than you can teach a delicate plant to grow, but you can guide him a little by planting a stick in here and a stick in there." ~ Frederick Delius Top of "D" section  ||  Top of page "So just, so small, yet in so sweet a note, It seem"d the music melted in the throat." ~ John Dryden "The soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper"d by the warbling lute." ~ John Dryden Top of "D" section  ||  Top of page "My own duty as a teacher... is not so much to interpret Beethoven, Wagner or other masters of the past, but to give what encouragement I can to the young musicians of America. I... hope that just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvelous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce, and has made an honorable place for itself in literature in one short century, so it must assert itself in the... art of music... To bring about this result, we must trust to the very youthful enthusiasm and patriotism of this country." ~ Antonin Dvorák Top of "D" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "After playing the violin for the cellist Gregor Piatgorsky, Albert Einstein asked, "Did I play well?" You played relatively well," replied Piatigorsky." Top of "E" section  ||  Top of page "I like to look on the composer's vocation as the old troubadours or bards did. In those days it was no disgrace to a man to be turned on to step in front of an army and inspire the people with a song." ~ Sir Edward Elgar "My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require." ~ Sir Edward Elgar Top of "E" section  ||  Top of page "There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music." ~ George Eliot Top of "E" section  ||  Top of page "New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky." ~ Duke Ellington "Somehow I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself." ~ Duke Ellington Top of "E" section  ||  Top of page On opera: "One of the most magnificent and expanseful diversions the wit can invent." ~ John Evelyn Top of "E" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Top of "F" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "...I got to try the bagpipes. It was like trying to blow an octopus." ~ James Galway Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "It's very odd! When I hear Massenet's operas I always long for Saint-Saëns". I should add that hearing Saint-Saëns" operas make me long for Massenet's." Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page ~ Henri Gauthier-Villars "It is proportion that beautifies everything, this whole universe consists of it, and music is measured by it." ~ Orlando Gibbons Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "It has been our purpose to produce something that should be innocent but not imbecile." ~ Sir William Schwenck Gilbert Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "If it hadn"t been for him, there wouldn"t have been none of us. I want to thank Mr. Louis Armstrong for my livelihood." ~ "Dizzy" Gillespie Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "I call architecture frozen music." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "Mozart died too late rather than too soon." ~ Glenn Gould Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the most beautiful, Rossini the most brilliant, but Bach is the most comprehensive: he has said all there is to say." ~ Charles Gounod Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges." ~ Benny Green Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "Music has charms, we all may find, Ingratiate deeply with the mind. When art does sound's high power advance, To music's pipes the passions dance: Motions unwill"d its powers have shown, Tarantulated by a tune." ~ Matthew Green Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page "A landscape, torn by mists and clouds, in which I can see ruins of old churches, as well as of Greek temples - that is Brahms." ~ Edvard Grieg Top of "G" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z On Handel: "Handel, to him I bow the knee." ~ Ludwig van Beethoven On Handel: "He is the master of us all." ~ Franz Joseph Haydn On Handel: "Handel understands effect better than any of us - when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderball." ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page "My Prince was always satisfied with my works. I not only had the encouragement of constant approval but as conductor of an orchestra I could make experiments, observe what produced an effect and what weakened it, and... improve, alter, make additions, or omissions, and be as bold as I pleased." "The other arts persuade us, but music takes us by surprise." ~ Eduard Hanlick Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page "I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First, to discourage the composer from writing any more, and secondly to remind myself how mush I appreciate Beethoven." ~ Jascha Heifetz Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page "People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least while the music lasts." ~ Paul Hindemith "Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions." ~ Paul Hindemith Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page "Music should either be done in a church or someone's home." ~ Gustav (Theodore) Holst Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page "It is clear that the first specification for a composer is to be dead." ~ Arthur Honegger Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page "Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune." ~ Kin Hubbard Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page "At first I thought I should be a second Beethoven, presently I found that to be another Schubert would be good; then, gradually, satisfied with less and less, I was resigned to be a Humperdinck." ~ Engelbert Humperdinck Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page "The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer." ~ Hubert Humphrey Top of "H" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently -- possibly almost invariably -- analytical and impersonal test will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep." ~ Charles Ives Top of "I" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else." ~ Samuel Johnson Top of "J" section  ||  Top of page "What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians... All publications masquerading under the name of ragtime are not the genuine article... That real ragtime of the higher class is rather difficult to play is a painful truth which most pianists have discovered. Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music... Joplin ragtime is destroyed by careless or imperfect rendering, and very often players lost the effect entirely by playing too fast." ~ Scott Joplin Top of "J" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "Fair Melody! kind Siren! I"ve no choice; I must be thy sad servant evermore; I cannot choose but kneel here and adore." ~ John Keats "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone." ~ John Keats Top of "K" section  ||  Top of page "People never write pretty melodies for tubas. It just isn"t done." ~ George Kleinsinger and Paul Tripp Top of "K" section  ||  Top of page "In the glorious radiance of it's timbre, in the life-giving abundance of its tone, and in its plentitude and virility, his voice seemed something inexhaustible. The capacity for giving pleasure by Caruso was equaled by no other figure of his time in all the realm of music." ~ Irving Kolodin Top of "K" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "There is delight in singing, though none hear Beside the singer." ~ Walter Savage Landor Top of "L" section  ||  Top of page "We are not an aria country. We are a song country." ~ Alan Jay Lerner Top of "L" section  ||  Top of page "You cannot imagine how it spoils one to have been a child prodigy." ~ Franz Liszt "Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words. If music has one advantage over the other media through which a person can represent the impressions of the soul, it owes this to its supreme capacity to make each inner impulse audible without the assistance of reason... Music presents at once the intensity and the expression of feeling. It is the embodied and intelligible essence of feeling, capable of being apprehended by our senses. It permeates them like a dart, like a ray, like a mist, like a spirit, and fills our soul." ~ Franz Liszt Top of "L" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "Everybody is talking about Paganini and his violin. The man seems to be a miracle. The newspapers say that long streamy flakes of music fall from his string, interspersed with luminous points of sound which ascend the air and appear like stars. This eloquence is quite beyone me." ~ Thomas Macaulay Top of "M" section  ||  Top of page "None knew whether The voice or the lute was most devine, So wonderously they went together." ~ Yehudi Menuhin Top of "M" section  ||  Top of page "Jazz is to be played, sweet, soft, plenty rhythm." ~ Thomas Moore Top of "M" section  ||  Top of page "Jazz is to be played, sweet, soft, plenty rhythm." ~ "Jelly Roll" Morton Top of "M" section  ||  Top of page Where he [Johann Strauss, Sr.] fiddles, all dance - dance they must...He himself dances, body and soul, while he plays - not with his feet but with his violin, which keeps bobbing up and down while the whole man marks the accent of every bar." ~ Ignace Moscheles Top of "M" section  ||  Top of page " "People make a mistake who think that my art has come easily to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not studied over and over." ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "Handel understands effect better than any of us - when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderball." ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity … of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "Mozart died too late rather than too soon." ~ Glenn Gould Top of "M" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street, In the city as the sun sinks low; And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet And fulfilled it with the sunset glow." ~ Alfred Noyes Top of "N" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "What else is "opéra comique", in fact, but sung vaudeville?" ~ Jacques Offenbach Top of "O" section  ||  Top of page "George Gershwin died last week. I don"t have to believe it if I don"t want to." ~ John O'Hara Top of "O" section  ||  Top of page "Music's the cordial of a troubled breast, The softest remedy that grief can find; The gentle spell that charms our care to rest And calms the ruffled passions of the mind. Music does all our joys refine, And gives the relish to our wine." ~ John Oldham Top of "O" section  ||  Top of page "Lutes, flutes, and lyres enervate the mind." ~ Ovid Top of "O" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "If I don"t practice for one day, I know it; if I don"t practice for two days, the critics know it; if I don"t practice for three days, the audience knows it." ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski Top of "P" section  ||  Top of page "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don"t live it, it won"t come out of your horn." ~ Charlie Parker Top of "P" section  ||  Top of page "After playing the violin for the cellist Gregor Piatgorsky, Albert Einstein asked, "Did I play well?" You played relatively well," replied Piatigorsky." Top of "P" section  ||  Top of page "Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul...Musical innovation is full of danger to the state, for when modes of music change, the laws of the state always change with them." ~ Plato "Music gives a soul to the universe." ~ Plato Top of "P" section  ||  Top of page "Poetry and painting have arrived to their perfection in our own country; music is yet but in its nonage [immaturity], a forward Child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter in England, when the masters of it shall find more Encouragement." ~ Henry Purcell Top of "P" section  ||  Top of page "There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres." ~ Pythagoras Top of "P" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Top of "Q" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z On Rachmaninoff's performing: "Even an ordinary broken chord is made to disclose rare beauties; we are reminded of the fairies" hazelnuts in which diamonds were concealed but you could break the shell only if your hands were blessed." ~ Neville Cardus Top of "R" section  ||  Top of page "Creation must be completely free. Every fetter one imposes on oneself by taking into account playability or public taste leads to disaster." ~ Max Reger Top of "R" section  ||  Top of page "... the roar of the crowd, the intensity that happens when you're in an arena, is overwhelming. It's one of those things you want to have every night." ~ singer Emily Robison of the Dixie Chicks, explaining the country trio's preference for playing indoor arenas rather than outdoor amphitheaters. Top of "R" section  ||  Top of page "Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they"ve heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations." ~ Ned Rorem Top of "R" section  ||  Top of page "The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless" ~ Rousseau Top of "R" section  ||  Top of page "One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don"t intend hearing it a second time." ~ Gioachino Rossini "How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers." ~ Gioachino Rossini Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside. ~ Ludwig van Beethoven "At the playing of Rossini's 'William Tell Overture (at the Albert Hall) an American lady said, 'Back home this is known as The Lone Ranger.'" ~ Peterborough column, The Daily Telegraph Top of "R" section  ||  Top of page "I cannot tell you how much I love to play for people. Would you believe it - sometimes when I sit down to practice and there is no one else in the room, I have to stifle an impulse to ring for the elevator man and offer him money to come in and hear me." ~ Artur Rubinstein Top of "R" section  ||  Top of page "All of one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time." ~ John Ruskin Top of "R" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself." ~ Erik Satie Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "(Arnold) Schoenberg is too melodious for me, too sweet." ~ Bertolt Brecht Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page On Caruso: "The man was unique. There never was a sound like his: that heroic attack, that velvet suavity, that sheer, exultant joy in singing." ~ Harold C. Schonberg Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah - that is where the art resides." ~ Arthur Schnabel Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "No one understands another's grief, no one understands another's joy... My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like best." ~ Franz Schubert "O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, how infinitely many inspiring suggestions of a finer, better life you have left in our souls!" ~ Franz Schubert Top of of "S" section  ||  Top of page "Sing a song, read a poem, paint a picture, hear the music... Rise up and touch the stars" ~ Susan Polis Schutz Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "The painter turns a poem into a painting; the musician sets a picture to music." ~ Robert Schumann "The singing voice is hardly sufficient in itself; it cannot carry the whole task of interpretation unaided. In addition to its overall expression, the finer shadings of the poem must be represented as well -- provided that the melody does not suffer in the process." ~ Robert Schumann Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "First, rehearse your song by rote, To each word a warbling note. Hand in hand, with fairy grace, Will we sing and bless this place." ~ William Shakespeare "He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute." ~ William Shakespeare "The horn, the horn, the lusty horn Is not a thing to laugh to scorn." ~ William Shakespeare "I am never merry when I hear sweet music." ~ William Shakespeare "Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note, Unto the sweet bird's throat. Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather." ~ William Shakespeare Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "You can rave about Stravinsky without the slightest risk of being classified as a lunatic by the next generation." ~ George Bernard Shaw "Hell is full of musical amateurs." ~ George Bernard Shaw Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains." ~ John Phillip Sousa On Sousa "In certain of his strains he struck an incomparably popular and vital note. He said the national thing in a certain way that no one else ever achieved, and that could be said only of this nation...Uncle sam in his striped hat, goatee, and trousers, out to lick the world, by gum." ~ Olin Downes Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail." ~ Issac Stern "There are more bad musicians than there is bad music." ~ Issac Stern Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "Don"t perspire while conducting - only the audience should get warm." ~ Richard Strauss "Never look at the trombones. It only encourages them." ~ Richard Strauss Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page "I heard Rosenkavalier for the first time after the war and I confess I prefer Gilbert and Sullivan...Sullivan has a sense of timing and punctuation which I have never been able to find in Strauss." ~ Igor Stravinsky "I never understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one." ~ Igor Stravinsky "Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." ~ Igor Stravinsky "Schumann is the composer of childhood...both because he created a children's imaginative world and because children learn some of their first music in his marvelous piano albums." ~ Igor Stravinsky "Harpists spend ninety percent of their lives tuning their harps and ten percent playing out of tune." ~ Igor Stravinsky "We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either." ~ Igor Stravinsky "Consonance, says the dictionary, is the combination of several tones into a harmonic unit. Dissonance results from the deranging of this harmony by the addition of tones foreign to it. One must admit that all this is not clear. Ever since it appeared in our vocabulary, the word "dissonance" has carried with it a certain odor of sinfulness. Let us light our lantern: in textbook language, dissonance is an element of transition, a complex or interval of tones that is not complete in itself and that must be resolved to the ear's satisfaction into a perfect consonance." ~ Igor Stravinsky On Stravinsky "New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky." ~ Duke Ellington "You can rave about Stravinsky without the slightest risk of being classified as a lunatic by the next generation." ~ George Bernard Shaw Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page Sir Thomas Beecham was once asked if he had played any Stockhausen. "No", he replied, "but I have trodden in some". ~ Sir Thomas Beecham Top of "S" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "I sit down to the piano regularly at nine o"clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous." ~ Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky "Music is no illusion, but rather a revelation. Its triumphant power lies in the fact that it reveals to us beauties we find in no other sphere; and the apprehension of them is not transitory, but a perpetual reconcilement to life." ~ Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky "How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry... As the poet Heine said, "Where words leave off, music begins." ~ Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Top of "T" section  ||  Top of page "The God of Music dwelleth out of doors." ~ Edith M. Thomas Top of "T" section  ||  Top of page "The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish." ~ Virgil Thomson Top of "T" section  ||  Top of page On Marian Anderson: "...a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years." ~ Arturo Toscanini Top of "T" section  ||  Top of page "I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds." ~ Mark Twain Top of "T" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Top of "U" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "The success of our operas rests most of the time in the hands of the conductor. This person is as necessary as a tenor or a prima donna." ~ Guiseppe Verdi "For dramatic effectiveness, it seems to me that the best material I have yet put to music is Rigoletto. It has the most powerful situations, it has variety, vitality, pathos; all the dramatic developments result from the frivolous, licentious character of the Duke. Hence Rigoletto's fears, Gilda's passions, etc., which give rise to many dramatic situations, including the scene of the quartet, which so far as effect is concerned, will always be one of the finest our theater can boost." ~ Guiseppe Verdi Top of "V" section  ||  Top of page You ought to write grand opera, Sir Arthur, you would do it so well " ~ Queen Victoria Top of "V" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z "I know nothing at all about music." ~ Richard Wagner "True drama can be conceived only as resulting from the collective impulse of all the arts to communicate in the most immediate way with a collective public... Thus especially the art of tone, developed with such singular diversity in instrumental music, will realize in the collective artwork its richest potential -- will indeed incite the pantomimic art of dancing in turn to wholly new discoveries and inspire the breath of poetry no less to an undreamed-of fullness. For in its isolation music has formed itself an organ capable of the most immeasurable expression -- the orchestra." ~ Richard Wagner On Wagner: WGMS radio station host, Dennis Owens, passed along this quote about Wagner: "Dying was a good career move." "One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don"t intend hearing it a second time." ~ Gioachino Rossini "I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds." ~ Mark Twain "Please write music like Wagner, only louder." ~ Sam Goldwyn, instructing a composer for a movie. "I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws." ~ Charles Baudelaire "I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage." ~ Oscar Wilde Top of "W" section  ||  Top of page "Your ears will always lead you right, but you must know why" ~ Anton Webern Top of "W" section  ||  Top of page Said Oscar Wilde: "Each man kills the thing he loves. For example, the amateur musician." ~ H. L. Mencken Top of "W" section  ||  Top of page "I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying "I don"t want to make a cemetery of your composition." ~ Hugo Wolf Top of "W" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Top of "X" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Top of "Y" section  ||  Top of page A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Top of "Z" section  ||  Top of page For Father's Day Bringing Up Father When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. ~Mark Twain The Thomas Music Studio is located in Beaverton, Oregon ~~ Piano, Violin Electric Keyboard Accompanying For more information: Email Natalie Thomas      ©  2000 All rights reserved.