Quotes about Musicians

On Phil Spector (Producer): "…he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that…if you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in and to me what he is saying is, 'It is not the song...just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it's me."

If you tolerate this, then your children will be next

Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.

A young music student went to a great composer and said, "sir, I want to know how to write a symphony." "what,"said the musician, "at your age?" "I am 19," replied the student, "and you wrote a symphony at that age." "true, true," mused the composer, "but I didn't have to ask how to do it!"

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true. At a concert he played when he was 95.

I'm a musician at heart, I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.

Poem for Liu Ya-tzu Night is long. And slowly comes the crimson sun-moon dawn. Demons and monsters danced about and whirled for hundreds of years and five hundred millions were not a family. Yet in one song the cock whitens the world. Song pours on us from ten thousand corners and musicians from Khotan play. Never before were we poets so moved. October 1950

The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

Puccini's personal life was an interesting one. He was exceedingly fond of hunting, smoking, attractive woman, mechanical devices of any kind, and acquiring houses. He died in 1924 from a heart attack while undergoing treatment for throat cancer. He was 65 years old. A national state of mourning was declared in Italy. Despite torrential rain, mourners lined the streets of Milan in tribute to the composer of some of the most popular works in the history of opera. Puccini chose to write about the everyday rather than the heroic. He understood the little things of life and portrayed them with sensitivity. Another reason for his popularity was his ability to write glowing melodies --- intimate, tender, passionate melodies. He understood the power of melody to express the deepest emotions, and his orchestral writing was eloquent. He was not only a highly skillful musician, but a poet who understood the significance of the smallest details, and a dramatist who possessed an innate sense of pacing and timing. While he was in the process of composing La Boheme, he wrote that his style was "poetry and again poetry - tenderness mixed with pain; sensuality; a drama surprising and burning; and a rocketing finale."

Reber [Johnson; a violinist] also got off another one, after I'd played over the Second Violin Sonata for him-that harmless piece. "After stuff like that"-he said-"if you consider that music, and like it, how can you like Brahms or any good music?" That is a very common attitude among almost all the well known lilies. They take it [i.e., that attitude] for granted-a kind of self-evident axiom, a settled-for-life matter, ipso facto, admitting of no argument. The classical is good for all time, the modern is bad for all time-so if you like one, you can't like the other. Describing the reaction of a typical professional musician to his, and other twentieth-century, compositions. "Lilies" was one of Ives' names for most of the concert goers of his era, who expected all music to be conventional and pretty.

Like the musician, the painter, the poet, and the rest, the true lover of flowers is born, not made. And he is born to happiness in this vale of tears, to a certain amount of the purest joy that earth can giver her children, joy that is tranquil, innocent, uplifting, unfailing.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.