Quotations.

Recently I borrowed a book from the Esplanade library titled “The Quotable Musician: from Bach to Tupac” by Sheila Anderson and found it pretty interesting, holding all manners of quotes from musicians and artists from all walks of life. I would like to grab some of the interesting quotes and share it with you guys…they’re all interesting, but whether I agree with them is another issue altogether.

***

‘Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living.’ – Kirke Mecham

‘I am not a blues singer. I am not a jazz singer. I am not a country singer. But I am a singer who can sing the blues, who can sing jazz, who can sing country.’ – Ray Charles

‘A good composer is slowly discovered. A bad composer is slowly found out.’ – Ernest Newman

‘Give me a laundry list and I’ll set it to music.’ – Puccini

‘The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.’ –Virgil Thompson

***

‘I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying, “I don’t want to make a cemetery of your compositions.” ‘ – Hugo Wolf

‘There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.’ – Sergei Prokofiev

‘You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh and go slow.’ – Oscar Levant, trying to explain his way out of a speeding ticket

‘I say, play it your own way. Don’t play what the public wants…you play what you want, and let the public pick up on what you are doing, even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.’ – Thelonious monk

‘Applause is a receipt, not a note of demand.’ – Artur Schnabel

‘If I don’t practice for one day, I know it; if I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it; if I don’t practice for three days, the audience knows it.’ – Ignacy Jan Paderewski

***

‘I cannot tell you how much I love to play for people. Would you believe it – sometimes when I sit down to practice and there is no one else in the room, I have to stifle an impulse to ring for the elevator man and offer him money to come in and hear me.’ – Arthur Rubinstein

‘Never look at the trombones; it only encourages them.’ – Richard Strauss

‘I am amazed at radio DJs today. I am firmly convinced that AM on my radio stands of Absolute Moron. I will not begin to tell you what FM stands for.’ – Jasper Carrott

‘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?” – Dmitri Mitropoulos

‘God tells me how the music should sound but you stand in the way.’ – Arturo Toscanini, to a trumpet player

‘Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.’ – George Szell

‘If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn’t have to go to an osteopath, then there’s something wrong.’ – Simon Rattle

‘He uses music as an accompaniment to his conducting.’ – Oscar Levant, on Leonard Bernstein

‘Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of bleeding, he sings.’ – Ed Gardner

***

‘Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.’ – Igor Stravinsky

‘Music rearranges your molecular structure.’ – Carlos Santana

‘The rhythm of jazz is against the normal psychological needs of Man.’ – The Peoples Music Press, Peking, China

‘I like Wagner’s music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music, instead of politics.’ – Richard Nixon

‘An artist should be judged by his best, just as an athlete is. Pick out my best work and say, “That’s what he did, all the rest was rehearsal.” ‘– Artie Shaw



:D