music quotations

assignment - pick one quote from these below and write 1000 words on why you agree, or disagree with it

 “Without music life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer , 1889

“My music is best understood by children and animals” - Stravinsky

 “Words are bound in chains, but, happily, sounds are still free” —Ludwig van Beethoven, 1826, writing to the poet Christoph Kuffner.

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent” – Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, 1864

 “From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music” – Aldous Huxley, “The Rest Is Silence” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

"Music alone has the power to evoke as it will the improbable places, the unquestionable and chimerical world which works secretly on the mysterious poetry of the night, on the thousand anonymous sounds made when leaves are caressed by the rays of the moon."- Debussy

“Music is probably the most difficult of the arts to criticize" - Winton Dean from "Criticism",  New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980  

“Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure” – E.M. Cioran

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation...  should be nothing without the form...  that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees....  It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other”- Walter Pater, in ‘The School of Giorgione’; from The Renaissance: Studies in Art & Poetry, 1877

“Music is the universal language of mankind” - ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Every theorist and philosopher who hasn’t a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia” – Nick Land, 1998

“I am never merry when I hear sweet music” – Jessica, from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

"This music is here in opposition to other music. It doesn't all co-exist together nicely. The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don't value what you're doing over there. My activity calls into questions the value of your activity. This is what informs our musical thinking and decision making" – UK improv musician John Butcher, in The Wire magazine, 2008

“Architecture is music in space....  a frozen music” - Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 1845

“Music...is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves” - Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, 1864

“Music “says” things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements “in our own words” is necessarily doomed to failure. We cannot isolate the truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a beauty-truth and inseparable from its partner. The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to the original. Thus, the introduction to the Benedictus in the Missa Solemnis is a statement about the blessedness that is at the heart of things. But this is about as far as “our words” will take us. If we were to start describing in our “own words” exactly what Beethoven felt about this blessedness, how he conceived it, what he thought its nature to be, we should very soon find ourselves writing lyrical nonsense… Only music, and only Beethoven’s music, and only this particular music of Beethoven, can tell us with any precision what Beethoven’s conception of the blessedness at the heart of things actually was. If we want to know, we must listen...” -  Aldous Huxley, in “Music at Night,” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

"Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!'. The call repeats itself into the infinite and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions.... as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment.... Rock'n'roll is a sign of depersonalisation of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity” - Dr Joost A.M. Meerlo, New York Times, 1957

“Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential 'fascism'?" --Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

"Music is nothing but organised noise. You can take anything -- street sounds, us talking, whatever you want -- and make it music by organising it" --Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy, 1990.

“Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking” - Aldous Huxley, “The Rest Is Silence” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

"Styles of music intended for dancing have a way of evolving into music for listeners only" --Charles Keil and Steve Feld, Music Grooves, 1994

"More participatory musics are more rhythmically complex (and harmonically simple); more contemplative musics are rhythmically simple (and more harmonically complex).’

– Simon Frith Performing Rites, 1996

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without” ― Confucius, The Book of Rites

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain” - Bob Marley

“When I'm tired and thinking cold / I hide in my music, forget the day /And dream of a girl I used to know/ I closed my eyes and she slipped away / She slipped away / It's more than a feeling / When I hear that old song they used to play” – Boston, “More Than A Feeling”, 1976

“God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble… The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart… Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful” – Friedrich Nietzche, autobiographical fragment, date unknown

“Invisible airwaves / Crackle with life /Bright antennae bristle /With the energy /Emotional feedback /On a timeless wavelength / Bearing a gift beyond price /Almost free /All this machinery / Making modern music / Can still be open-hearted / Not so coldly charted /It's really just a question /Of your honesty, yeah your honesty”- Rush, “The Spirit of Radio”, 1980

“We're lost in music / Caught in a trap / No turnin' back / We're lost in music / Feel so alive /I quit my nine to five / We're lost in music” – Sister Sledge, “Lost In Music”, 1979