# Literary musical quotes



## Ephemerid (Nov 30, 2007)

I've got a fun idea (unless this has already been done before?)-- how about people listing favourite quotes, passages or poems relating to music? People could post them here. Not so much quoting musicians on music, but I was thinking poets, writers, or any non-professional music related people. Whether they are witty quips or poems with a literary flair, you name it! 

What say ye?  

~josh


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## Ephemerid (Nov 30, 2007)

As an example, I'll start:

*MUSIC
*_For D.D. Sh. [Dmitri Shostakovich]
_

It creates miracles.
In its eyes limits are defined.
It alone talks with me
when others are afraid to come near,

when the last friend has turned his eyes away.
It was with me in my grave
and sang like the first storm, 
or as though all the flowers had burst into speech.

_Anna Akhmatova 
1958_


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## 4/4player (Nov 17, 2006)

How about this one that I remember at the moment ...:

" If Music be the food of love..."
--- Shakespeare

* ROFL*

Keeping Beat,
4/4player


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## Ephemerid (Nov 30, 2007)

"If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die."

Sounds good to me! 

Here's a funny quote from the typically misanthropic E.M Cioran on Bach: "Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the universe cannot be regarded a complete failure." LOL

~josh


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## opus67 (Jan 30, 2007)

Then there's the one on Wagner's music from Woody Allen.

"_I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland._"


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## marval (Oct 29, 2007)

Quote from Ed Gardner (American comic actor/writer)

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding he sings.


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## Ephemerid (Nov 30, 2007)

Hahahaah Opus67 & Marval, that's hilarious!!

I'm going to have to copy & paste these to keep...

~josh


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## Ephemerid (Nov 30, 2007)

One more from E.M. Cioran: 

"Only paradise or the sea could make me give up music."

I think I understand that sentiment...

~josh


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## hawk (Oct 1, 2007)

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." Bill Nye 

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." Igor Stravinsky 

"Even Bach comes down to the basic suck, blow, suck, suck, blow." Larry Adler (mouth organist)

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." Voltaire

"Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune". Kim Hubbard

"Massenet
Never wrote a Mass in A
It'd have been too bad
If he had." Anthony Butts

" I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to". Elvis Presley

These are from the book The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said
Robert Byrne


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## marval (Oct 29, 2007)

Music is the best means we have of digesting time. WH Auden

There are two golden rules for an orchestra, start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between. Thomas Beecham

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers, and for two reasons. It is to discourage the composer from writing any more and, to remind me how much I like Beethoven. Heifitz

After playing the violin for the cellist Gregor Piatgorsky, Albert Einstein asked "did I play well"? Piatgorsky replied "you played relatively well*


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## Chi_townPhilly (Apr 21, 2007)

G.B. Shaw once stated that the plot for a typical "number-opera" is "Tenor wants to mate with Soprano, but is thwarted by Baritone."


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## Erik Helm (Dec 31, 2007)

"Take it for granted from the beginning that everything is possible on the piano, even when it seems impossible to you, or really is so" Busoni

(on Brahms) I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying " I don't want to make a cemetery out of your composition" Hugo Wolf

" One can't judge Wagner's opera 'Lohengrin' after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time." Rossini


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## messiaenfanatic (Dec 21, 2007)

“No one should be allowed to make music as if he were made of wood. One must reproduce the musical text exactly, but not play like a stone.” Messiaen

I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener. Arvo Part


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## Ephemerid (Nov 30, 2007)

TO MUSIC

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: 
silence of paintings. You language where all language 
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space _in _us, 
which, rising above us, forces his way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other 
side of the air:
pure, 
boundless, 
no longer habitable.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)


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## Ephemerid (Nov 30, 2007)

"I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, [to be] streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later." Lewis Thomas

LOL

~josh


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## marval (Oct 29, 2007)

"An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to The William Tell Overture, and not think of the Lone Ranger." Don Rather


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## opus67 (Jan 30, 2007)

marval said:


> "An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to The William Tell Overture, and not think of the Lone Ranger." Don Rather


_
A classical music geek is someone who can't listen to the Lone Ranger theme without thinking about the William Tell Overture._ - Yours Truly


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## trojan-rabbit (Nov 27, 2007)

_Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music_ -Sergei Rachmaninoff

or something like that


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## Krummhorn (Feb 18, 2007)

Here's one I have used for my own purposes - it's posted on the organ console in the church where I am employed:

Amateur musicians practice until they get it right ... 
Professional musicians practice until they can't get it wrong ...


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