Category Archives: Quotations

What they say about the trombone: quotations

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trombonist enrages neighbor. trombone quotations

Enraged Neighbor, a lithograph by Bourdin after an image by Robert William Buss (1838). The handle on the slide indicates a bass trombone

Looking back over everything I have written in this blog, I noticed it has been a while since I offered any quotations. And I have never offered quotations about the trombone. And so I figured I’d have a fairly easy time of going to the usual quotation sites and picking some good ones.

Wrong. I couldn’t find very many interesting trombone quotes at all.

This one from Trombone Shorty might explain why: Continue reading →

What is music? Classical composer quotes

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composers quotationsYou know what music is when you hear it. Then again, someone else might have a completely different idea. One person’s music is another person’s noise.

So what is music? And where does it come from?

It’s not as if anyone can actually define it, but composers have expressed their opinions. What did they think they were doing? Here are some famous composers’ quotes Continue reading →

Composers: quotations about other composers

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composers quotationsAs a lover of classical music, you enjoy the music of many composers, but dislike others.

Composers are no different, except that they are required to study other composers’ music carefully whether they like it or not, both their contemporaries and generations of earlier composers.

Perhaps you have never heard of Brian Ferneyhough. Living composers are little known to today’s public, but he made the observation more eloquently than I can:

“Composers dialogue – and obsessively, bitterly argue – with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.” Continue reading →

A literary dozen: quotations about music

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According to Aaron Copland, “If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.” What do you think about the following examples?

buy classical musicTake a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist – G. K. Chesterton

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable. – Samuel Johnson

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

Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a-dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey to an interminable tedious sweetness; Continue reading →

College students and music

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musicology for everyoneI remember hearing about a student who turned in his final examination paper after only half an hour. He had not written answers to any of the questions. He only drew a tomb stone, with the epitaph: “sacred to the memory, which leaves me at times like this.” Here are some comments on tests and papers from students who might as well have followed his example. Enjoy!

Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is the product of the mad genius who struggled to find work, and keep his pants on.

Michael Jackson brought back dancing, which still exists today.

Composers of the 18th century were known for writing music that allowed them to stay alive and feed their families.

And so the moral of Sweeney Todd is that you should be careful what you eat, because it might be people.

An African hymn which might sound all happy and joyous to individuals living in Canada, is really a miserable depressed story they are telling through their rituals.

African and Caribbean influences are among the most relevant in the style with all these musical dialects becoming intertwined, creating a steaming pile of musical wonder that took the nation, and world, by storm.

A keyboard instrument that was around before the piano was the keytar.

This is not the only time in history men were castrated.  In my music class I found out that eons of years ago male children were castrated so they could become soprano’s.  Soprano’s were highly thought of by society and since they were castrated as very small children, they were raised as soprano’s.  This group of men were called the pastrami’s.  Look it up, very interesting.

After hearing the music of the French troubadours, Petrarch began to write sonnets about courtney love.

Hippies and CDs are both things from America’s past.
S and M stands for smoke and mirrors and was a common practice in the middle ages, before modern pop singers like Rihanna made it popular.

Deathcore bands, and fans, do not know how to growl like a death metal band. They think it is cool to scream and make pig noises when it actually makes them look like a poser. Metal heads know how to growl well, and they sound good when they growl.

What they say about the piano

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buy classical musicLife is like a piano… What you get out of it depends on how you play it. ~Author Unknown

The piano is the social instrument par excellence… drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment. ~Jacques Barzun

PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by pressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience. ~Ambrose Bierce

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.

Pianos

Pianos at the Sauder Village and Museum, Archibold, Ohio

A piano store looks like a funeral parlor for music. ~ Ramon Gomez de la Serna

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. ~Ani Difrenceo

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in and the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge. ~William Gaddis

When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. ~Bob Hope

The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air. ~Kenneth Miller

Get up from that piano. You’re hurtin’ its feelings. ~ Jelly Roll Morton

On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing ‘Abide with Me’ in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates. Malcolm Muggeridge

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel

The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth. ~Andre Segovia

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation. ~Oscar Wilde

They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice- ‘Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. ~Oscar Wilde

Photo credit: David M. Guion