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MUSIC QUOTES

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Music, Computer/Technology, Teacher, Business Quotes

MUSIC QUOTES

INSPIRATION
Thanks to Dr. Van Philpot copyright 2000 he wrote:
"Johannes Brahms is the biologist of music. His symphony #1 portrays the full dimensions of the life cycle with its majesty and minute perfection. Like the intertwining of molecules from air and soil into living cells-moving, breathing, reproducing, the symphony rolls gently and powerfully to intertwine itself with the melody, harmony and rhythm of the biological world. The pounding of tympani in the first movement takes one to the grandeur of nature seen from the top of a mountain. The soft strains of the second movement takes one to a moss covered glen in a wooded area where each molecule of chlorophyl is acted upon by a photon of light to catalyze the inorganic to the organic. The famous melody of the fourth movement portrays a scene by the brookside with its alga,. one celled organisms, fish, snakes fuse to become a single gently flowing organism. When science and music are blended by the immaterial component of the human mind, one has a vision of God."

A society matron approached Kreisler after a concert, and said: "Maestro Kreisler, I'd give my life to play like that!" To which the violinist replied "I did."

"I write [music] as a sow piddles."

- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

No limits. That's the Net mantra. Enable free transferability. Just hope that you reach a ton of people, just hope that your project lives on.

Bob Lefsetz

"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

Music Glossary Definitions

 

Music Terminology

In an effort to keep you abreast of the ever-changing world of music terminology, we provide you with some terms with which you should be familiar:

Adagio Fromaggio:

To play in a slow and cheesy manner.

AnDante:

A musical composition that is infernally slow.

Angus Dei:

To play with a divine, beefy tone.

Anti-phonal:

Referring to the prohibition of cell phones in the concert hall.

A Patella:

Unaccompanied knee-slapping.

Appologgiatura:

A composition, solo or instrument, you regret playing.

Approximatura:

A series of notes played by a performer, not intended by the composer.

Approximento:

A musical entrance that is somewhere in the vicinity of the correct pitch.

Bar Line:

What musicians form after a concert.

Concerto Grossissimo:

A really bad performance.

Coral Symphony:

(see Beethoven-Caribbean period).

Cornetti Trombosis Disastrous:

The entanglement of brass instruments that can occur when musicians exit hastily down the stage stairs

Dill Piccolino:

A wind instrument that plays only sour notes.

Fermantra:

A note that is held over and over and over and ...

Fermoota: A rest of indefinite length and dubious value.

Fog Hornoso:

A sound that is heard when the conductor's intentions are not clear.

Frugalhorn:

A sensible, inexpensive brass instrument.

Gaul Blatter:

A French horn player.

Good Conductor:

A person who can give an electrifying performance, or alternative use, one who obeys the orchestra and/or chorus

Gregorian Champ:

Monk who can hold a note the longest.

Kvetchendo:

Gradually getting annoyingly louder.

Mallade:

A romantic song that's pretty awful.

Molto bolto:

Head straight for the ending.

Opera buffa:

Musical stage production by nudists.

Poochini Musical:

performance accompanied by a dog.

Pre-Classical Conservatism:

School of thought which fostered the idea, "if it ain't baroque, don't fix it."

Spritzicato:

Plucking of a stringed instrument to produce a bright, bubbly sound, usually accompanied by sparkling water with lemon (wine optional).

Tempo Tantrumo:

When a young band refuses to keep time with the conductor.

Tincanabulation:

The annoying or irritating sounds made by extremely cheap bells.

Vesuvioso:

A gradual buildup to a fiery conclusion.

ZZZfortzando:

Playing REALLY loud in order to wake up the audience.

COMPUTER QUOTES

 

 

The revolution will not be televised, it will be distributed freely over the Internet via peer-to-peer filesharing.
--- Rich Kulawiec, with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron

Never say anything in an electronic message that you wouldn't want appearing, and attributed to you, in tomorrow morning's front-page headline in the New York Times.
--- Colonel David Russell, former head of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
-- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
-- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what ... is it good for?"
-- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp.,1977

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
-- Western Union internal memo, 1876

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
-- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible."
-- A Yale Univ. management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work f or you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'"
-- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer

Teacher Quotes

 

"Life is not measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." ~ Annon.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable. --- George Bernard Shaw

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.  --- Joseph Lewis

"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to re act. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
-- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work

"When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature." --Sigmund Freud

"The heart has reasons reason never knows." --Pascal

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask." --Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Herman Melville

QUOTES ABOUT BUSINESS

 

 

clickety-clickety...hey! I know this film! I *love* the Funk Brothers! Well done, *really* well done. Wow.
---Rsk

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
-- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper."
-- Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind"

"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make."
-- Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
-- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
-- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."
-- Spencer Silver on work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads

"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training."
-- Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy."
-- Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
-- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
-- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction."
-- Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusi on of the wise and humane surgeon."
-- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, 1873

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." Mark Twain