Seeing this in another thread about music and maths, it gave me a random topic to start



Does anyone know any nice quotes or sayings of there own about music ?



x


oooo ooo oo i have one about practicing teehee! " Amatures practice untill they get it right, proffesionals practice until they can't get it wrong! " A teacher once told me that...

Lots, I'm sure, none I can remember off the top of my head though, naturally!

My definition of a good sight reader - someone who is skilled at musical bull######!


Oo-er, I've been ######ed!!!

'And yet, when all is said and done, no one knows what music is. Perhaps the explanation is that music is the very stuff of creation itself' Lucien Price (I think?)
It was from a little book I bought years ago 'Music Lovers Quotations' or something along those lines...the whole quotation was much longer but I used that part for a webpage I had some photography on so I don't remember any more without looking it up!

'Where words fail, music speaks' I have it on a key ring, so not sure exactly who said it...remember our head of music using it in a newsletter, Plato or something similar rings a bell, but that might have been another quotation!

"There are three types of people instrument owners, instrumentalists and musicians. Be a musician."

'Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory' - Oscar Wilde

'Music is the poetry of the air' - Richter

'It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony' - Benjamin Britten

'Music is the silence between the notes.' - Debussy

Then there's: 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.' - Elvis Costello (Hmm, that's what I want to do... )

Ambrose Bierce described the clarinet as 'An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears'.

He didn't know what he was talking about!

Tchaicowsky described Brahms as "a giftless b@stard. Why, in comparison to him, Raff is a genius"

(helps if you know who Raff is, I suppose...)

That's a very singular spelling of Tchaik's name, MrB!


Hehehe

Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside you, and take some of you with it when it leaves."
- Henry Threadgill

"The difference between professional and amateur musicians is that professionals are broke."

How does a professional musician become a millionaire?


He starts off with two million.

headline in local paper ...

Drunk gets six months in violin case

"The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead."
Igor Stravinsky. "Subject: Music", New York Times Magazine, 9/27/64

Max Reger

'I am sitting in the smallest room of my house with your review of my work before me. Shortly it will be behind me!'

Oscar Wilde

'I am not awfully fond of the 'cello. Sounds to me more like a bee buzzing in a stone jug'

Thomas Beecham

1.'The harpischord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof'

2. (to lady cellist in the Halle)
'Madam you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it'

Beethoven
'It is true that I studied with Haydn, but I never learned anything from him'

"Music is the only noise for which one is obliged to pay.", Alexander Dumas

"The Italians exault music, the French enliven it; the Germans strive after it; The English pay for it well." Georg Matheson, 1713

"Musicke might tame and civilize wild beasts, but 'tis evident that it never could tame and civilize musicians." John Gay

That one always makes me laugh

Oops, sorry! I didn't realise you were an expert in Cyrillic transliteration!

Did someone call??

Oh, sorry, you said CyrillIC...

And yes, Sarah's a Russian scholar

Not an expert, by any means, but yes I did study Russian at uni. Why, did you transliterate it yourself?

Tchaicowsky looks almost like it's been transliterated via Polish to me.

Not saying it's wrong - after all there are as many transliterations as transliterators - merely singular, meaning I have never seen it transliterated that way before. I generally go for the "normal", traditional way, "Tchaikovsky" - but if I were to try and transliterate "Чайкoвский" without having seen the usual transliteration I'd be most likely to come up with some variation on Chaikovskii or Chaykovskiy. I think I've seen Chaikovsky used before.

Having got used to the Tch, Ch looks odd now, though.

Cyrilla:

I know I'm barking, but if you Google™ it, you will see a tonne of hits on that spelling
Not sure why it's so surprising, it's very close to Tchaikovsky, apart from the common swap of c-k and w-v.
I prefer Cheyecoughskee I think...

"The good composer is slowly discovered; the bad composer is slowly found out."
- Ernest Newman

"There is one God - Bach - and Mendelssohn is his prophet."
- Hector Berlioz

"Is there a heart that music cannot melt?
Alas how is that rugged heart forlorn."
- James Beattie

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

"Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life."
- Jean Paul

"Modern music: Three farts and a raspberry, orchestrated."
- John Barbirolli

"Let me have music dying and I seek no more delight."
- John Keats

"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed."
- Oscar Wilde

"When I re-read my theoretical works, I can no longer understand them."
- Richard Wagner

"If man is the tonic, and God the dominant, the Devil is certainly the sub-dominant and the woman the relative minor."
- Samuel Butler

"A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it."
- Thomas Beecham

"And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long
The simple bird that thinks two notes a song."
- W. H. Davies

"Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast
To soften rocks or bend a knotted oak."
- William Congreve

"Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails with here and there an also dropped hammer."
- John Ruskin

I'm not saying you won't - and didn't say it was wrong. It just looks very odd. Hence my remark that it was singular.

A lot of Polish words will have W for a V sound cos that's how it's spelt. It isn't in Russian. In Russian actually it looks like a B...! But the closest direct translieration is a V.

Personally I've never understood why a W would be used for a sound that clearly ain't a W in Russian (not pointing the finger at you, MrB, but at the people who would transliterate the Russian в that way). I find it very odd indeed. The в is often sort-of swallowed in Russian depending on the accent, but I don't think I've ever heard it sound closer to a W than a V.

To my Russian-trained eyes, and especially having learned some Polish and other Slavonic languages, "Tchaicowsky" looks like a Polish transliteration *shrugs* it just... does. (It isn't - apparently it's Czajkowski in Polish).

Interestingly, Tchaicowsky comes up with 700 plus hits on Google, and Chaicovsky just over 800 - but most of the Chaicovsky ones don't seem to be in English. Even Chaicowsky comes up with a few. Chaikowsky comes up with lots... unsurprisingly Tchaikovsky comes up with some 6 million. So if Google is your yardstick...

Far as I'm concerned you can use whichever you like, even Cheyecoughskee - I just prefer to use those which are more recognised and are a reasonably good rendition of the original Russian.


Lots of lovely ones but it was these two that made me laugh

"Ah, music, a magic beyond all which we teach here!" - Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Philosophers stone.

"Music, life......same thing" - Anon.

The following are more like jokes but you could think of them as quotes.....
Q: How many 2nd violinists does it take to screw in a light bulb??

A: None - they can't get up that high.

Ba-doom boom chsh. (yes, I am a 2nd violinist.... )

Q: What's the difference between a viola and an onion?

A: no-one cries when you cut up a viola. (sorry violists - i didn't make it up. it just made me laugh )

Q: how do you know when a singer's at your door?

A: They can't find the right key and don't know when to come in

I have plenty more but I don't want to stay off-topic, so I'll go back to a quote:

Fritz Kreisler: "Genius is an overused word. Very few people are actually geniuses. I only came fairly near"

Oooh good one, pianoboe

LOL at the singer one - that's very funny!!

"If music be the food of love, play golf" Can't remember the author but it was part of "oneupmanship" on the radio, years ago.

"Wagner has some wonderful moments . . . and some perfectly dreadful three-quarters of an hour" Rossini

"Keep your eye on that young man: One day he will give the world something to talk about" W A Mozart at a piano recital. The soloist was Beethoven.

Another two from Beecham:-

'Bach - far too much counterpoint, whats more, its Protestant counterpoint!'

.........and when asked if he had conducted any Stockhausen...........

'I dont think I have, but I may have stepped in some'

This is probably heard too many times: "Gone Chopin, Bach soon. Taken Liszt."

These quotes are great and hillarious!