Marcus du Sautoy Quotes

Sure, I love people, and I want to communicate with people. I mean, what is music anyway? It's a form of communication - at least for me it is. And that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.

Music is a language.

I want my music to do the explaining.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

That's one of the good things about music. You get to do it live, where you can touch the people and interact with them.

These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.

The word music is a convenient way to talk about what I'm interested in, but actually, in some ways, it's a limitation.

Music is a language, you see, a universal language.

I was touched by the magic of music. My way to communicate was through my guitar and music.

Music can describe emotions far more accurately than words ever can. As soon as I realised that, I knew music was where I wanted to be.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.

The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy - and it made me feel something. That's when I realized music was inside me.

The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.

Music expresses what cannot be put into words I like to think, and I think the band makes a good go at it.

You know, there're no rules between Russell and I. We don't want to have to have to talk too much, because it's really precious, really special to play music.