Music as Art Quotes

Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.

I think that music is still art, even if it's commercialised.

I see songs not as a commodity used up when the album goes off the charts, which is often the case with pop songs. I see them as a body of work. Life should be breathed into them.

When people come to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken the longest stride forward since the beginning of time.

I'm a fanatic about Irish music. I love its moody, modal and timeless quality. I'm different from some other composers, because I don't look at this as just a job. I think of music as art.

Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world, if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it - and you are an artist - it punishes you.

It's fun having songs about parties and gigolos, but I really wanted to use my music as a form of art. Art is supposed to spark conversation and make people think, and I wanted to do that with this song.

To some extent, I've always felt that the music should be the thing that creates the emotion in you, rather than a video.

I do have a big problem with the idea of music as a form of communication unless it's political - and that's where it's tricky because a lot of music is political, even if it's not overtly so. But my music isn't that; it's about a feeling.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

There's a Slow Food movement. I think I'm part of the Slow Music movement.

What I appreciate about Sleater-Kinney is that we did six records, and they all felt different. It was a band that was able to encapsulate different sensibilities because we were focusing on it as music and art and not as a statement.

I guess I'm kind of a sucker for the emotion of music. I guess it's kind of odd, but it's the way I appreciate music. I present my stuff that way as well.

If you look at someone like Joe Strummer or John Lennon, when you heard their music you knew that they wrote it and they cared about it.

Like David Bowie, Madonna visualizes music so that her best work seems equally designed with the stage or screen in mind - not just the jukebox.

As someone who worships music, I believe it can never be ugly!

In our world, as artists, the only time I'm allowed to express myself is through song.

We wanted to create an opportunity for people to share anything, on their own terms, revenue and all. Get away from the commerce side of music, which can be exciting and necessary but ultimately dilutes the creative impulse. The further and further you go down that path is sometimes the further you are from the reason why you started making music.

As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

One thing that really appeals to me is this idea of music being a living thing that has an evolution that, in a way, enables the artist to sell a process rather than a piece of product.

I always make music as an art - it's never been a product for me.

I can't just listen to music walking down the street unless I have a reason to. I can't just listen to music as a piece of junk in the background. It drives me insane.

I'm definitely a fan of dance music. I guess we really call it 'dance' music because music seems to have become very functional. For years, people were trying to be everything. Now, musicians are becoming very specific.