Brian Eno Quotes

In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass.

I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

I don't see music as working.

I think that's one of the things that has always put me in kind of an odd niche. It's that all of my understanding of orchestral music is via film, not via classical music like it's supposed to be. To me it's the same, it doesn't make any difference.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

You can say what you think music is, but the only way it really is, is how people experience it.

It's hard to find an emblem of cultural, national pride that burns as bright as Israel's success in classical music.

It's interesting about classical music that the more you hear something, the more you get to know a piece, the better and better it gets, period, which is just an interesting thing on it.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

There should be no boundaries in your relationship with sound. Often it's not about the music itself but the context in which you hear the music. For instance, listening to a piece of classical music in a film you love often changes your perception of it entirely.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

Music is the highest art and to those who understand, is the highest worship

Whenever I think about funk music, it has a look - and that's how it sounds.

I hate the opera. I think I must have a tin ear. No matter how hard I concentrate it still sounds like a bunch of Italian chefs screaming risotto recipes at each other.

I personally don't think of the music as being particularly dark, though many seem to disagree as I often have to answer that question. I try and make the Lustmord sound have a real mass and a tangible presence, which some choose to interpret as dark. It's an interesting distinction. Although there are dark elements interwoven within the whole, it's only one of many textures.

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?

An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad.

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

With music you can express any emotion, you can paint pictures.

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.

Some people think a song without words isn't a real song. Tell that to Beethoven and he'll kick your ass!

If you thought Stairway to Heaven was a long song, dear god you should listen to it played on a lute.