Daniel Levitin Quotes

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.

And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

Movies can provide tear-inducing or comically-entertaining representations of love, but many agree that its deeper conflicting complexities often seem unfathomable.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

Classical music's ability to translate emotional themes is fantastic.

I make music for people to relate to and to connect with me. I want to tap into different emotions.

I want to soundtrack people's layered feelings.

It doesn't matter how big the set is or how florid the music is: if it doesn't touch people's hearts, then I don't want to be in it.

We aren't robots. What makes us exceptional as humans, is that we have the capacity to feel as many emotions all at once.

People in day-to-day life tend to skim the surface of things and be polite and careful, and that's not the language I speak. I like talking about feelings, fears and memories, anguish and joy, and I find it in music.

Love is a lot more complicated than people think.

No person is just one particular emotion.

I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.

I like to be able to feel as many parts of myself while watching a movie at one time. I think that's what 'Super' is - it's funny, but it's also sad. It's very touching in certain ways, and it's also got a very dark sense of humor. So it's allowed to go anywhere.

With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.

For 'Drive,' we needed the songs to dictate emotions and really bring you into the mind of The Driver; he's a unique and complicated guy, so the music itself had to be unique and complicated.

Piano symbolizes interiority.

That's the thing about the blues: It's one thing to hit a note on a guitar. To make it matter is something else altogether.

I like the idea of a record being more than one thing emotionally - human beings go through so many emotions in one day - and I like those things sitting next to each other.

I love movie musicals because I think there is an amount of emotional honesty that's needed to portray someone who feels so deeply that all they can do is break into song.

The whole deal with my music has been the emotional quality.

Our industry holds a musical perception about each emotion that we depict in our narrative. As music composers, our job is either to cater to that particular need or give it a contrast that grows on the audience in a way that it begins to sound more universal, than just obvious and expected.

My music has to be funny and sad and happy and loving; it's gotta have it all. When somebody's just too dark all the time, it's just drama. Or if somebody's too funny? Well, I like being too funny sometimes.