Musical Cadence Quotes

There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.

Music is a language, you see, a universal language.

I've always really liked the rhythm element of songs.

Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper... a windshield wiper that's fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing 'Melancholy Baby' and you've got dance music.

My heart beats in three-quarter time.

What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.

To brisk notes in cadence beating, glance their many-twinkling feet.

To me it's just the knock, man. It's the knock and the groove of the beat. When I start a song, it's the first thought. It's the first thought and the first cadence, because that's the most natural. You know what I'm saying? I feel like people can feel when something is natural.

Melody always comes to me first before words - cadence and melody. When you're humming the melody and it's incredible and words start coming out it can build into something special.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

One of the struggles that I have with classical music is the way one thinks about a recapitulation. There's always this idea of themes, and I have trouble with that.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Therefore we well observe that the title of perfect cadence is attached only to a dominant that progresses to the main tone, because this dominant, which is naturally contained within the harmony of the main tone, seems, when it progresses to it, to return as if to its source.

In the theater, it's about taking time in a musical segment, a pause in a musical way and then moving on.

A thousand trills and quivering sounds In airy circles o'er us fly, Till, wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die.

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.