- (Will be expanded as leisure permits.)
There are many things in music which must be imagined without being heard. - Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing. - Bela Bartok
The heart of a melody can never be put down on paper. - Pablo Casals
Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning. - Frederic Chopin
If the music doesn't say it, how can words say it for the music? - John Coltrane
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer to that would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No." - Aaron Copland
It is only that which cannot be expressed otherwise that is worth expressing in music. - Frederick Delius
The greatest advantage that a writer can derive from music is, that it teaches most exquisitely the art of development. - Benjamin Disraeli
Music is something innate and internal, which needs little nourishment without, and no experience drawn from life. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Music means itself. - Eduard Hanslick
The sole contents of music are moving, sounding forms. - Eduard Hanslick
Melody is the main thing; harmony is useful only to charm the ear. - Joseph Haydn
It is the melody which is the charm of music, and it is that which is most difficult to produce. The invention of a fine melody is a work of genius. - Joseph Haydn
Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves. - Victor Hugo
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. - Aldous Huxley
Much of the effect of music is owing to the association of ideas. - Samuel Johnson
The power and the magic of music lie in its intangibility and its limitlessness. It suggests image, but leaves us free to choose them and to accommodate them to our pleasure. - Wanda Landowska
Music is a calculation which the soul makes unconsciously in secret. - Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz
What is best in music is not to be found in the notes. - Gustav Mahler
Music is the fragrance of the universe. - Giuseppe Mazzini
Melody is the very essence of music. - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
A man responds or fails to respond to certain music by virture not only of what the music is, but of what he is. - Ernest Newman
Music paints the sentiments and speech defines them. - Georges Noufflard
Music is the perfection of the soul, or idea, of Poetry. The vagueness of exultation aroused by a sweet air (which should strictly be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we should aim at in poetry. - Edgar Allan Poe
Indefinitiveness is an element of true music - I mean of true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision - imbue it with any very determinate tone - and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissove the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it of its breath of faery. - Edgar Allan Poe
All discord, harmony not understood. - Alexander Pope
I think and feel in sounds. - Maurice Ravel
Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations. - Ned Rorem
Music never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself of all phenomena, the will itself. - Arthur Schopenhauer
In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of. - Robert Schumann
Melody ... belongs to the noblest gifts which an invisible godhead has made to humanity ... The melodic idea, coming straight out of the ether, which suddenly overtakes me, which appears without any material stimulus or psychic emotion ... emerges from the imagination, immediate unconscious, without benefit of the intelligence ... is the greatest of divine gifts, not to be compared with any other. - Richard Strauss
I am beginning to think together with the general public that melody should keep its place at the summit of the hierarchy of all elements which constitute music. - Igor Stravinsky
Perhaps in our joy in musical rhythm, there is expressed something of the primal joy of procreation ... Rhythm is both measurable and immeasurable ... akin to nature, and yet the sensitive child of the muses ... The domain of rhythm extends from the spiritual to the carnal... - Bruno Walter
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