quotations about music
Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
Hark to the music! How beneath the strain
Of reckless revelry, vibrates and sobs
One fundamental chord of constant pain,
The pulse-beat of the poet's heart that throbs.
EMMA LAZARUS
"Chopin"
Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
G. K. CHESTERTON
attributed, The Pleasure Instinct
Modern music, headstrong, wayward, tragically confused as to what to say and how to say it, has mounted its horse, as the joke goes, and ridden off in all directions. If we require of an art that it be unified as a whole and expressed in a universal language known to all, if it must be a consistent symbolization of the era, then modern music is a disastrous failure. It has many voices, many symbolizations. It it known to one, unknown to another. But if an art may be as variable and polyvocal as the different individuals and emotional regions from which it comes in this heterogeneous modern world, then the diversity and contradiction of modern music may be acceptable.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
Though I am not endowed with an ear to seize those earthly harmonies, which to some devout souls have seemed, as it were, the broken echoes of the heavenly choir--I apprehend that there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto would bring us in our singing to the level of shrieking maniacs or howling beasts.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
It was a moment when your music was the totality of your identity, and so you were so caught up and so invested in it.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
interview, Rolling Stone
Music lends grace and dignity to life; it softens care, alleviates regrets, refines and enlivens sensibility, links the ideal to the actual, and suggests a flow of life in unison with its harmonies.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought