music quotations
Below is list of quotes, which may be of use to you. If you have any good quotes you would like to see here, please e-mail them.
· Alan Walker (1968): You cannot have critics with standards, you can only have music with standards which critics may observe.
· Andrés Segovia: (on coughing at concerts) It's quite easy to stifle a cough if you work at it.
· Andrés Segovia: Music is like an ocean and the instruments like small islands. Some are flat, others mountainous, some are florid. The guitar is one of the most beautiful of the islands. I say that as a musician and not a guitarist.
· Andrés Segovia: A true artist is no more scared of critics than an honest man of the police.
· Leo Brouwer: I don't have any limits, or feel any limits in the guitar. I consider it a small orchestra, and almost perfect. People discover that the guitar has a very small sound. This could be a defect or a quality. I consider it a quality for intimacy. The guitar has all the colors, and the polyphony, and many, many things - except powerful sound. You can communicate completely. And there's a magic tone that you can get out of the guitar. In fact, the guitar is one of the few minor instruments, like harpsichord and recorder, which not only remains but develops and grows. The polyphony which has evolved with the guitar helps to include a modern language, along with the heritage form the Renaissance up to now. So we are millionaires in terms of repertoire, color and expressiveness! Other instruments have magic but not history. We have all!
· Felix Mendelssohn: Life and art are not two different things
· Franz Schubert: The guitar is a wonderful instrument, which is understood by few.
· Frederic Chopin: Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, save perhaps two.
· Georges Bizet (1867): "Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!"
· George Friedrich Handel: I do not wish to amuse my audience; I wish to make them better.
· Igor Stravinsky: A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
· Manuel de Falla: (of the guitar) The instrument most complete and richest in its harmonic and polyphonic possibilities.
· Maurice Ravel: Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.
· Thomas Robinson: (using a wonderful word to describe a difficult piece of music ) "if it be not too trickified"
· Joaquin Rodrigo: In heaven we will all be sounds.
· Kurt Pahlen: Music is an acoustic phenomenom for poets; a technical problem of melody, harmony and rhythm for professional musicians; a soul expression that can exalt us infinitely and that encloses all the human feelings, for those who really love music with all their heart.
· Pepe Romero: Music is a manifestation of love....if you are touched by music you are touched by love in a very pure way.
· Pepe Romero: The guitar, by its very nature, the nature of its sound, by the soft nuance of its powerful and ancient voice, by the magic of the tone, goes directly to the part of oneself where love is felt. When I hear the sound of the guitar, it goes to some part inside of me that opens the door that holds feelings of love and everything that is beautiful which lives inside of me.
· Pepe Romero: The guitar is a meditative tool to touch God and find love within yourself. Look for the perfect truth in the pieces you play. Playing a piece too fast is betraying the truth to ourselves and the universe, producing more garbage sounds a littering the universe. Nerves never attack a person in love.
· Nicolo Paganini: I love the guitar for its harmony; it is my constant companion on all my travels.
· Ned Rorem (1972): Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.
· Oscar Wilde (1891): If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
· Paul Hindemith (1952): The reactions music evokes are not feelings, but they are the images, memories of feelings.
· Sir Thomas Beecham: The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
· Whitney Balliett (1962): A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.
