Quotes about music

When you’re a musician free is a magic number.

“Cyrus was a musician?” I asked.

“He played the alto sax.”

“And he played jazz?”

Another brief smile. “Is there any other kind of music?”

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

—Dizzy Gillespie

The song is over. But the melody lingers on.

I wanted to tell him that all lives are the same length when viewed from the foreshortened perspective of death, and that life, like music, requires no meaning but only a certain symmetry.

[...] I learned from those evening recitals that music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.

When you’ve heard one bagpipe tune you’ve heard them both.

No one ever took music away from me, but I’m damned if it ever sounds quite as good as it used to when I was twenty.

We may have had music before we had a word for it.

Music... is... a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.

Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.