Quotes about music

The familiar sense of peace rises inside, and my hands stretch toward the piano. And then I play.

My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand mathematics and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common.

“I really didn’t mean to steal it.”

Mr. Williams shook his head. He scratched at his chin nervously. “Why not? That’s what they’re there for. Tunes belong to everybody. So do stories.”

Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?

You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it.

when all of them joined in to sing about lovers and fights and broken-down cars, it was a shared world, between all tribes, all nations. (p 296)

That was one of the most rewarding things about spending nights in the open. Birds were bound to wake you up, and whether they carried good or bad luck, at least they woke you up with music.

One of the nice things about living alone— maybe the only good thing about living alone, Frank thinks—is that you can play opera at 4:00 a.m. and not bother anyone. And the house is solid, with thick walls like they used to build in the old days, so Frank's early morning arias don't disturb the neighbors, either.

Boundaries between noise and sound are conventions, I see now. All boundaries are conventions, national ones too. One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so.

Bowman could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness…He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart.

And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

Because of 'Porgy' people often compared me to Billie Holiday, which I hated. That was just one song out of my repertoire, and anybody who saw me perform could see we were entirely different. What made me mad was that it meant people couldn't get past the fact we were both black: if I had happened to be white nobody would have made the connection. And I didn't like to be put in a box with other jazz singers because my musicianship was totally different, and in its own way superior. Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn't fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be. It was a racist thing; 'If she's black she must be a jazz singer.' It diminished me, exactly like Langston Hughes was diminished when people called him a 'great black poet'. Langston was a great poet period, and it was up to him and him alone to say what part the colour of his skin had to do with that.

I’ve always believed that my dad is right about one thing—your life is your solo and whatever song you choose to sing you only get to do it once.