1. Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times,
accompanied
by myself.
Erik Satie (Paris 1913)
2. Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.
Charlie Parker
3. A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
Frank Zappa (1989)
4. I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.
Lou Reed (London 1989)
5. Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.
Jimi Hendrix
6. I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
Billie Holiday (1956)
7. Playing "bop" is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
Duke Ellington (New York 1954)
8. Today he plays jazz; tomorrow he betrays his country.
Stalinist Slogan in the Soviet Union (1920s)
9. A nation creates music—the composer only arranges it.
Mikhail Glinka (New York 1958)
10. You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.
John Lennon (1970)
11. Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
Lawrence Durrell (1960)
12. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter.
John Keats
13. The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides.
Artur Schnabel
14. No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1822)
15. A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I’m still doing it.
Miles Davis (Paris 1991)
16. Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.
Igor Stravinsky (1946)
17. I’m glad I’m not me!
Bob Dylan (1965)
18. It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of "culture."
John Cage (New York 1961)
19. I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people.
Charles Mingus
20. My goal … is to uplift people, as much as I can. To inspire them to realize more and more of their capacities for living meaningful lives. Because there certainly is meaning to life.
John Coltrane
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