"I write [music] as a sow piddles."
--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
|
"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer."
--Cole Porter |
"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool
than
play Bach and starve."
-- Xavier Cugat |
"[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me
businessmen
every time. They really are interested in music and art."
--Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his
home. |
"The amount of money one needs is terrifying..."
--Ludwig van Beethoven |
"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you
can
make a living."
--Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer |
"Chaos is a friend of mine."
--Bob Dylan |
"There is nothing more difficult than talking about music."
--Camille Saint-Saëns |
"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come
crawling
to my feet."
--Niccoló Paganini |
"Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you
sleep all day."
--Ringo Starr |
"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of
taste?"
--Nathaniel Hawthorne
|
"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you
bought two or three seats."
-- Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan. |
"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's
conversation."
--Oscar Wilde |
"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs
together."
--Mel Brooks |
"life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the
Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years."
--William F. Buckley, Jr. |
"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh
and go slow."
--Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket. |
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
--Mark Twain |
"I love Beethoven, especially the poems."
--Ringo Starr |
"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently."
-- James Gibbons Hunekar |
"If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony
like
that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder."
--Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland |
"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."
--Sergei Prokofiev |
"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra... Does a lion
tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?"
--Dimitri Mitropolous |
"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the
way."
--Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player |
"Already too loud!"
-- Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra,
on seeing the players reaching for their instruments. |
"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than
Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere."
--Frederic Chopin |
"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally
and
rubbed his name off the piano."
--Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller |
"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
--Richard Strauss |
"In opera, there is always too much singing."
--Claude Debussy |
"An exotic and irrational entertainment."
--Samuel Johnson's definition of opera |
"If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it."
--Pierre Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville |
"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of
dying, he sings."
--Robert Benchley |
"I'd hate this to get out, but I really like opera."
-- Ford Frick |
"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were
no
singers!"
--Gioacchino Rossini |
"Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica."
--Sir Thomas Beecham |
"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in
the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse."
--Bing Crosby
"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already."
--Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.
"If you have to ask, you'll never know."
--Miles Davis' answer to the question, "What is Jazz?" |
"Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently
resourceless
brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire,
the indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though
closely rivaled by
the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed
only by
the ineptitude of the studio production method. (Strawberry
Fields
suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio
Monteverdi
and a jug band.)"
--Glenn Gould |
"Making a record is like painting a school bus with a toothbrush"
--Quincy Jones |
"A rock band used to be four guys and a drummer. Now it's five guys sitting around reading manuals!"
--Bill Bruford |
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