Thoughts and reflections on music, an article with great analysis by famous authors and musicians on the deep inner value and importance of music for our lives.
Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.
Jean Genet
Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.
Henri Frederic Amiel
When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan’s Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.
Steven Halpern
Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.
Sir John Herschel
Now, to curry favor with the younger generations, the Pope has decided, among other things, to become the megaphone of rock stars and starlets, once the devil’s music. And so even the old rebel Bob Dylan will play for the pontiff, not for free, of course, but only for the modest sum of five hundred thousand euros.
Carl William Brown
Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.
Claude Levi-Strauss
The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skilful than our own.
Claude Levi-Strauss
A friend of mine, when he heard I was writing a book about stupidity, said to me, “You know, to increase your productivity, you should listen to music.” I asked him what kind of music, and smiling he confidently replied, “A little bit of everything is more than fine.”
Carl William Brown
We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn’t just ours — it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can’t beat it.
Greil Marcus
The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
Ezra Pound
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and lifestyle. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.
George Steiner
Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you’re always going to find a hip-hop tape; that’s all I buy, that’s all I live, that’s all I listen to, that’s all I love.
Eminem
September 1998. Lucio Battisti dies, a great poet who, through his songs, even managed to give a certain dignity to banality. He was a musical beacon for many generations, and even Carl William Brown paid him a great tribute in the distant 1980s by purchasing a compilation of Battisti’s greatest hits, made in Naples, from a Moroccan in a bar in Brescia.
Carl William Brown
Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
William Congreve
The conductor begins to move from where the composer, the genius, left off. The most important thing is to serve the music, and serve it with love. An “act of love,” very close to an act of faith, one might say. The conductor as servant. However, at the moment of performance, the situation changes. “At that moment, the composition belongs to me. You have to be deeply convinced that this is the only way to interpret it, that this is the truth.” Because, in turn, the performance then represents who you are as a person. I have to be fully involved, feeling that that work belongs to me, to my life, heart, and body, as much as to my mind.”
Carlo Maria Giulini
The servant of genius is himself a genius artist. The most important thing is to serve the music, and serve it with love. An “act of love” that interpret life as art, and art as life, and you can’t deny that Kriss Drummer is an extremely lively girl.
Carl William Brown
I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn’t exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.
Michelle Branch
There have existed, and still exist, despite the disruptions that civilization brings, small, delightful peoples who learned music with the simplicity with which one learns to breathe. Their conservatory is: the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand small noises attentively perceived, without ever resorting to arbitrary treatises.
Claude Debussy
The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly… music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.
Andres Segovia
There can be no musical instrument that does not mix pure sound, which consists only of the vibrations of the air, with an extraneous addition, due to the vibrations of the material from which it is made. These vibrations, by their impulse, cause those of the air and produce a minimal accessory sound, so that each sound receives its specific character: thus, for example, what distinguishes the sound of the violin from that of the flute. But the less this accessory mixture, the purer the sound: this is why the human voice has the purest sound, since there is no artificial instrument that can equal the natural instrument.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten
I asked my daughter when she was 16, What’s the buzz on the street with the kids? She’s going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren’t into Kiss. But they’ve all been told that it’s the greatest show on Earth.
Ace Frehley
It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.
Bruce Beresford
Times were changing. Clothes were changing. Morals were changing. We went from romantic loves songs like I used to do to rock ‘n roll. Now that has changed to rap. So, there’s always a new generation with new music.
Bobby Vinton
He who cannot rely on any music within himself, and cannot be moved by the harmonious harmony of sweetly modulated sounds, is ready for treachery, deceit, and robbery: the motions of his soul are dark as night, and his affections as dark as Erebus. Let no one ever trust such a man.
William Shakespeare
Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the wine taste richer, the laughter ring louder because they are there.
Judith Viorst
The works of all truly capable minds are distinguished from others by their characteristic of decisiveness and determination, along with the qualities that derive from them, namely perspicuity and clarity, because such minds always knew precisely and clearly what they wanted to express – whether in prose, verse, or musical notes.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I have never watched a whole concert in my life, nor a musician playing for more than ten minutes without getting bored, what’s more I have never liked heavy metal music or estremely hard rock, but with Kriss Drummer is different, she is extremely magnetic and charismatic. Someone told me to let Kriss be my gateway drug, but as an old metaphorical witchdoctor I must admit that I only used dangerous substances when I was much younger.
Carl William Brown
What does it mean to have musical feeling? You don’t have it if you play your piece from beginning to end with great difficulty, anxiously staring at the written notes, or if you stop abruptly in your performance, completely unable to continue, if someone accidentally turns two pages at once. But you undoubtedly possess this musical feeling if, while playing a piece that is completely new to you, you roughly guess what follows, or know it by heart if the piece is already known to you; in a word, if you have music not only in your fingers, but also in your head and heart.
Robert Schumann
The essence of music is to awaken in us that mysterious foundation (inexpressible by literature and in general by all finite modes of expression, which use either words and consequently ideas, specific things, or specific objects – painting, sculpture) of our soul, which begins where the finite and all the arts that have the finite as their object stop, where science stops, and which can therefore be called religious.
Marcel Proust
The ear, the organ of fear, could only develop as richly in the night and semi-darkness of dark forests and caves as it did, according to the way of life of the age of fear, that is, the longest human age ever. During the day, the ear is less necessary. Hence the character of music, as an art of the night and semi-darkness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This book is nothing more than a pilgrim’s journey to the sanctuary of stupidity. He’s not in good company, so he listens to the advice of the wise men of the past and a bit of rebellious, melancholic music. The pitfalls are many, but he isn’t afraid; he’s not a worshipper, much less a flatterer; on the contrary, he’s a destroyer.
Carl William Brown
It is through music that the West reveals its true nature and reaches its depths. If the West has not created a wisdom or a metaphysics entirely its own, nor even a poetry that can be said to be unparalleled, it has, however, projected into its musical productions all its original force, its subtlety, its mystery, and its capacity for the ineffable.
Emil Cioran
The thing that makes music beautiful is that you never reach perfection. So every night I ask myself: how am I going to approach that song? How can I make the most of it? Sometimes something goes wrong so you have to try again. One day you discover something new, a new feeling. It’s beautiful.
Ziggy Marley
If one could give a perfectly exact, complete, and detailed explanation of music – that is, if one could reproduce in concepts point by point what it expresses – one would certainly also have an adequate conceptual reproduction and explanation of the world […], that is, true philosophy.
A. Schopenhauer
Pop music is a lullaby. After all, look how young people sway when they listen to it: they lull themselves to sleep […] Think of those young people who prepare for exams to the sound of rock ‘n’ roll: their parents think the radio is keeping them from studying, and they take it away; the kids then become truly incapable of studying. They can complete that work as adults only if they aren’t deprived of the childhood gratifications they need.
B. Bettelheim
A melody is a set of successive sounds of varying pitch, each having a relationship such that their overall perception is capable of satisfying both the intellect and the senses. This linear, horizontal aspect of music contrasts with the vertical aspect of sets of simultaneous individual sounds, or chords, whose formation and concatenation constitute harmony.
G. Ferchault
Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit – Drum Cover by Kristina Rybalchenko
Music is the most romantic of all the arts; its theme is the infinite, it is the mysterious Sanskrit of nature expressed in sounds, which fills the human heart with infinite desire, for only in it can one hear the sublime song of trees, flowers, animals, stones, and water!
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
Whether melody comes first and implies harmony, or whether melody is a horizontal development of harmony, is the subject of a centuries-old dispute. It has no answer, nor is it worth seeking. Harmony and melody interact and, in the Western musical tradition, are inseparable.
R.F. Goldman
Mozart has the classical purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur that belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while Mozart’s soul seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, Beethoven’s trembling climbs the stormy slopes of Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment in the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.
Henri Frederic Amiel
When Mozart composed in the late 18th century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be sounded verbally, by a screaming guard atop St. Stephen’s Cathedral. In 20th-century society, the noise level is so high that it constantly slams our bodies and disrupts their natural rhythms. This increasingly intense sonic assault on our ears, minds, and bodies increases the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.
Steven Halpern
Music and dancing (which is a pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less educated classes that it can scarcely be said that a taste for them, for their own sake, exists, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a profound change of ideas must occur.
Sir John Herschel
Since music is a language endowed with meaning at least for the vast majority of humanity, although only a small minority are capable of formulating meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being simultaneously intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself is the supreme mystery of human science, a mystery with which all the various disciplines collide and which holds the key to their progress.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Musical emotion arises precisely from the fact that at any given moment the composer retains or adds more or less than the listener expects, based on a pattern he thinks he can intuit but is incapable of fully grasping. If the composer retains more than we expect, we experience a delightful sensation of falling; we feel torn from a stable point on the musical scale and thrust into the void. When the composer retains less, the opposite happens: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillfully than our own.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
We make our way through the collective, massed, and leveled taste of Top 40, searching for just a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and listen to it again, it’s not just ours: it’s a connection to thousands of others who share it with us. As a single song, this might mean very little; as a culture, as a way of life, it’s unbeatable.
Greil Marcus
The author’s belief, on this New Year’s Day, is that music begins to atrophy when it strays too far from dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it strays too far from music; but this should not be interpreted to imply that all good music is dance music or all poetry is lyrical. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
Ezra Pound
The new soundscape is global. It spreads at great speed across languages, ideologies, borders, and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is astonishing. Rock and pop generate concentric worlds of fashion, setting, and lifestyle. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public modes, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden resonates strongly.
George Steiner
Perhaps all music, even the most recent, is not so much something discovered as something that resurfaces from where it lay buried in memory, imperceptible like a melody engraved on a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been locked away silently within me.
Jean Genet
Nor is it surprising that the ear delights in diverse sounds, since the sight delights in the variety of colors, the sense of smell delights in the variety of odors, and the tongue delights in the variety of flavors. Thus, through the window of the body, the sweetness of pleasurable sensations miraculously penetrates to the depths of the heart.
Guido of Arezzo
What does it mean to have musical feeling? You don’t have it if you play your piece from beginning to end with great difficulty, anxiously staring at the written notes, or if you stop abruptly in your performance, completely unable to continue, if someone accidentally turns two pages at once. But you undoubtedly possess this musical feeling if, while playing a piece that is completely new to you, you roughly guess what follows, or know it by heart if the piece is already known to you; in a word, if you have music not only in your fingers, but also in your head and heart.
Robert Schumann
The natural and general effect of music on us comes not from harmony but from sound, which electrifies and shocks us at first touch, even when it’s monotonous. This is what makes music special above the other arts.
Giacomo Leopardi
A piece of jazz is always different every time you play it: it should never be composed, rather, it is composed in the moment you play it. It’s no coincidence that the word jazz comes from New Orleans brothel slang; it’s a term related to sex, and sex, as we know, is the pinnacle of creativity and improvisation; always different, never the same.
M. Aaron
Works in which the genius of the intellect shines forth do not appear alive and beautiful unless they are performed in a manner that is also alive and beautiful, warm and delicate, faithful, grandiose, brilliant, and animated. The excellence of a performance depends not only on the choice of performers but on the spirit that animates them.
H. Berlioz
Teaching is a peaceful method that seeks to study and implement the best way to disseminate knowledge in general. It applies to all disciplines and involves and entails the analysis of all aspects of human life: scientific, emotional, social, technical, cultural, economic, artistic, recreational, literary, musical, and so on. Teaching is therefore an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary applied philosophy that aims to improve human existence in the universe.
Carl William Brown
The error begins when one draws the false conclusion that the laws, since they are apparently true for phenomena observed up to that point, must henceforth also be valid for all future phenomena. This is the most disastrous result: one believes one has found a norm for determining the artistic value of future works as well.
A. Schönberg
It is chained to commercial music, if only by its predominant source material, dance music. To complete the picture, we must add the amateurish inability to account for musical phenomena with precise musical concepts, an inability that vainly seeks to justify itself by invoking the difficulty of accurately capturing the secret of jazz’s irregularities, since the notation of serious music has long taught us to capture incomparably more subtle oscillations on paper.
Th. W. Adorno
The term ‘atonal’ came to collectively designate music that was not only claimed to lack a harmonic center (tonality in Rameau’s sense) but also music equally devoid of musical attributes such as melody, rhythm, partial or general form; so much so that ‘atonal’ today indicates music that is not music at all. […] In fact, in atonal music […] all the other characteristics expected of true and authentic music are present. […] As in all other music, in this music too, the melody, the lead voice, the theme, are fundamental since the development of the music, in a certain sense, is determined by them.
A. Berg
Now, to curry favor with the younger generations, the Pope has decided, among other things, to become the megaphone of rock stars and starlets, once the devil’s music. And so even the old rebel Bob Dylan will play for the pontiff, not for free, of course, but only for the modest sum of five hundred million.
Carl William Brown
Instinctive listening doesn’t exist for me: music is an artificial phenomenon, the product of highly complex cultural factors, for which, at the moment of listening, a personal historical vision and a natural habituation to this or that style come into play, even if at an unconscious level. Instinctive listening, I would say sensorial, is possible only for a child, free and without taboos.
L. Berio
Little by little, a mysterious emotion took hold of me, tearing down all my internal defenses, the dams of a different culture, the worn-out trenches of my older generation. I felt that, little by little, as the fiery afternoon advanced toward evening, the concert was taking shape and establishing itself in its barbaric and powerful ritual form, slowly and relentlessly ascending toward catharsis.
R. De Monticelli
In Mediterranean civilizations […] making the lyre vibrate means making the world vibrate: the cosmic wedding is fulfilled, the earth is fertilized by the sky, it rains on the fields, and women’s hips grow heavy. All musical instruments seem to have been so many means to access the secret harmony of the world.
J. Servier
Melody and harmony should be merely tools in the artist’s hands to create music, and if a day comes when there is no longer any talk of melody or harmony or German or Italian schools, or of the past or the future, etc., etc., then perhaps the reign of art will begin.
Giuseppe Verdi
I don’t know how to write poetically: I’m not a poet. I don’t know how to arrange sentences so artfully that they cast shadow and light: I’m not a painter. I don’t even know how to express my feelings and thoughts with gestures and pantomime: I’m not a dancer. But I can do it with sounds: I’m a musician.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Musical notation is extremely mysterious. It’s made up of small signs we call “notes,” but the note, as long as it remains only on paper, is dead… this note begins to live the moment it becomes sound… and this is only the physical part, after all. Equally mysterious is the fact that the conductor is the only musician who doesn’t play an instrument and the only one who can produce a sound without any physical contact with the instrument. So how is the sound produced? “There’s no explanation.”
Carlo Maria Giulini
Music shouldn’t be taken seriously, or maybe it should, but only up to a certain point. You can take your job, your family, your politics seriously. When you want to escape from all that shit, you do it by listening to music. You don’t want to listen to sad songs, you need to have fun. That’s the spirit in which Green Day makes music.
Billie Joe Armstrong
If you love music you can also visit the following pages:
Best music and songs from 2010s onwards
Best music and songs from 2020 onwards
