Music Quotes

I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

I'm making a record that's half stripped down acoustic which is the way I perform a lot and half of it is very produced. It's really hard to keep music simple but I was trying to keep it simple and focus on one or two instruments and vocals.

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.

So okay, I accepted, and I realized while working for that concert that I'd been missing something very important and vital to me, and that something was music.

People's lives change dramatically over such a long time period, and I think that if you're still vital, and you're still interested in writing and things like that, of course your music evolves and reflects where you are in your life.

'Music for Relief' has played a vital role in helping get aid to people who most need it. We are deeply honored to participate in what will likely be our biggest event to date.

I thought the '60s was the most exciting time and the most vital music, and we were really together as one mind then. Then afterwards, the songs and the bad drugs, that took its toll.

What we ask of music, first and last, is that it communicate experience - experience of all kinds, vital and profound at its greatest, amusing or entertaining at another level.

The Gershwin legacy is extraordinary because George Gershwin died in 1937, but his music is as fresh and vital today as when he originally created it.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

I used to hate, with a capitol H, making videos. It was nothing but a chore. It was something you had to do to have your music accepted in the visual medium.

The only reason that you do visual is solely for the visual. That's the only reason. It doesn't sell your music for you.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

Today, music is visual.

There is an atmosphere about the picture theatre that speaks of entertainment and relaxation. The charming surroundings, good music, and the fact that each visitor is determined to enjoy a few hours of holiday all exert an influence on the mind.

I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures.

I'm always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

But nevertheless, it's music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world.

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising.

I just prefer instrumental. I don't need to hear what other people are singing. And if I need music as a backdrop to work or to think, I need to have that part of the brain clear - I don't need people feeding their fantasies into my vision.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you.

Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like a vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off.

My whole mood or sense can change by virtue of the music that I'm listening to. It really does affect me on a visceral and emotional level.

I have never learned to read or write music so I am not a virtuoso musician like the others you mentioned. I am completely unable to play like them because I never learned classical music, I just developed my own crazy style!

What is the best music is impossible to define. Just because it's played by a virtuoso player, doesn't mean it's great music. It might not reflect the soul of a people, which is really my criteria for great music.

I believe it is in my nature to dance by virtue of the beat of my heart, the pulse of my blood and the music in my mind.

Well I was on the one hand, the more I played the guitar the more I began to really love the guitar and to love virtually any kind of music that anybody played well on guitar.