Musical Understanding Quotes

You can look at someone and get to know their music and say, 'This is someone who I want to work with.'

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

When you start reading a piece together, you get a sense of someone's basic philosophy of music without saying a word. You realize the other person's approach, how they express themselves, the kind of restraint they show, all those things.

Jimi Hendrix came from the blues, like me. We understood each other right away because of that. He was a great blues guitarist.

When you do a lyric for 'April in Paris,' those who have heard it before can hear it in a different way now. It can add perspective to a great piece of music that does not have a lyric and may be inaccessible to lot of ears because people don't deal with complex music very well.

People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside.

I feel it's quite important to have a band but what's more vital is to be friends with the members of the band. If there's not a bond there, you won't be able to jam. Apart from that, it's also vital to have the same vibe.

You cannot enter a studio and just start crooning before the mike. It is essential to understand the mind of the composer, mood of the song, and meter of the tune.

I'm not really a strange person or anything, so if there's music I like, usually there's other people who like it too.

As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.

Nothing is more futile than theorizing about music. No doubt there are laws, mathematically strict laws, but these laws are not music; they are only its conditions? The essence of music is revelation.

Sometimes, going to see one opera is hard because you don't know the genre. Good opera is like good wine. There are so many varieties, and it helps to inform you about what you like when you see a lot.

My wife, Gayle, is a wonderful musician and singer. We share music, so it's a deep bond.

I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer.

Music is such a great communicator. It breaks down linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, it basically reaches out. That's when rock n' roll succeeds, and that's what virtuosity is all about.

Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I've known my whole life, even if I haven't.

However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.

I'd rather you listen to my music with a confused face, you know? Rather than you just hearing a good flow to a good beat.

What a song is is a subjective thing. There's no one real definition for it.

How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

When I first met Benny Goodman he wouldn't talk about anything but clarinets, mouthpieces, reeds, etc. When I tried to change the subject, he said 'But that's what we have in common. We both play clarinet.' I said, 'No, Benny, that's where we're different. You play clarinet, I play music.'

A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.

Music is the universal language.