Our exposure to different types of music, and hence our musical literacy, has certainly expanded, but perhaps at a cost. As Daniel Levitin has pointed out, passive listening has largely replaced active music-making. Now that we can listen to anything we like on our iPods, we have less motivation to go to concerts or churches or synagogues, less occasion to sing together. This is unfortunate, because music-making engages much more of our brains than simply listening. Partly for this reason, to celebrate my 75th birthday last year, I started taking piano lessons (after a gap of more than sixty years). I still have my iPod (it contains the complete works of Bach), but I also need to make music every day. - neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia
Mastery comes from practice; practice comes from playful, compulsive experimentation. – Stephen Nachmanovitch
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. –Italian proverb
The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for adults. -Arthur Schnabel
Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. - Confucius
Good music is good no matter what kind it is. -Miles Davis
If the King loves music, it is well with the land. -Mencius
Music is what feelings sound like. -Anonymous
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. -Benny Green
Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? - Michael Torke
We cannot change the hand we are dealt, just how we play the hand. -Randy Pausch (see "Randy Pausch's Last Lecture" under Food for Thought)
Truly innovative people don't innovate, or at least not as any kind of conscious project. Instead, they embrace new ideas -- either because the ideas solve a problem, or else just because the people involved love them -- and make those ideas happen. Greg Sandow, blog entry in The Future of Classical Music (www.artsjournal.com/sandow/), Dec. 2, 2008
Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless. –Thomas Alva Edison
Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day. –Abraham Maslow (http://sivers.org/maslow)
Music begins where words end. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. -Ezra Pound
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -Johann Sebastian Bach
If music be the food of love, play on: give me excess of it... -William Shakespeare
The love of one’s art is an aspect of technique. – Bruce Adolphe, The Mind’s Ear
Tshikona is lwa-ha-masia-khali-i-tshi-vhila, "the time when people rush to the scene of the dance and leave their pots to boil over." Tshikona "makes sick people feel better and old men throw away their sticks and dance." Tshikona "brings peace to the countryside...." It is an example of the production of the maximum of available human energy in a situation that generates the highest degree of individuality in the largest possible community of individuals. --John Blacking on the Venda (South African) national dance
I like nonsense. It wakes up the brain cells. – Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Suess)
Without the arts -- including music -- we risk graduating young people who are "right-brain damaged." - Paul Harvey
The arts, inspiring -- indeed requiring -- self-discipline, may be more "basic" to our national survival than traditional credit courses. Presently we are spending 29 times more on science than on the arts and the result so far is worldwide intellectual embarrassment. -Paul Harvey
I always loved music; whoso has skill in this art is of good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music; or I would not regard him. -Martin Luther
The point of music, as always, is not how clever it might be, but how expressively it communicates. – Rod Paton
Too many people today are trying to justify the precision with which organized musical sound is produced rather than the energy with which it is manipulated. –David Diamond (1939)
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. –Thomas Edison
The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes. –Sir Thomas Beecham
Learn to repeat difficult passages many times in a row. This is particularly important after the passage has been learned. – Philip Farkas, The Art of Horn Playing
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. – Confucius
To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult. – Plutarch
I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work. –Benjamin Franklin
Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know. –John Keats (1819)
When taking a shower, take a shower. When playing horn, play horn. -Zen Saying