Fun_People Archive
1 Jul
Musical Quotes

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sat,  1 Jul 100 08:33:57 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: Musical Quotes

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"I write [music] as a sow piddles."
 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer."
 - Cole Porter

"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already."
 - Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery
   in rural Austria.

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play
 Bach and starve."
 - Xavier Cugat

"[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs.  Give me businessmen
 every time.  They really are interested in music and art."
 - Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.

"The amount of money one needs is terrifying..."
 - Ludwig van Beethoven

"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make
 a living."
 - Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer

"Chaos is a friend of mine."
 - Bob Dylan

"There is nothing more difficult than talking about music."
 - Camille Saint-Saens

"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to
 my feet."
 - Niccolo Paganini

"Of course I'm ambitious.  What's wrong with that?  Otherwise you sleep
 all day."
 - Ringo Starr

"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?"
 - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought
 two or three seats."
 - Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan.

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's
 conversation."
 - Oscar Wilde

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together."
 - Mel Brooks

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the
 Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years."
 - William F. Buckley, Jr.

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go
 slow."
 - Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
 - Mark Twain

"I love Beethoven, especially the poems."
 - Ringo Starr

"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently."
 - James Gibbons Hunekar

"If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like
 that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder."
 - Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."
 - Sergei Prokofiev

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra... Does a lion tamer
 enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?"
 - Dimitri Mitropolous

"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way."
 - Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

"Already too loud!"
 - Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on
   seeing the players reaching for their instruments.

"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than
 Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere."
 - Frederic Chopin

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and
 rubbed his name off the piano."
 - Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
 - Richard Strauss

"In opera, there is always too much singing."
 - Claude Debussy

"An exotic and irrational entertainment."
 - Samuel Johnson's definition of opera

"If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it."
 - Pierre Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville

"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he
 sings."
 - Robert Benchley

"I'd hate this to get out, but I really like opera."
 - Ford Frick (Commissioner of Baseball)

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no
 singers!"
 - Gioacchino Rossini

"Movie music is noise.  It's even more painful than my sciatica."
 - Sir Thomas Beecham

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the
 twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse."
 - Bing Crosby

"Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless
 brand of harmonic primitivism...  In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the
 indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled
 by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only
 by the ineptitude of the studio production method.  (Strawberry Fields
 suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio
 Monteverdi and a jug band.)"
 - Glenn Gould

"A ponderous orchestral absurdity."
 - Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the Los Angeles
   Philharmonic

"It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some
 kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of
 undifferentiated weirdness."
 - Jerry Garcia

© 2000 Peter Langston