Taj Mahal Quotes

Mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group.

Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they're about their own thing.

Nobody else in the world has a form like the Native American musical, and Americans should be very proud.

But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.

The music is just so rich and part of the culture there. I suddenly felt like I needed to go on this mission to make sure we save New Orleans because - not that I can save anything - but it's so much part of what this country is, this whole mix of people coming together and doing this thing.

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.

I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures.

The music we're playing now is based on my heritage, which is Russian, Romanian and Hungarian.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.

I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music.

I feel that the music that I do is somewhat of a lost art and it's not as popular as dance or pop music and people are not as interested in it. But it's something that I believe in and I feel that it's needed, so that's why I do it and I will keep doing it until everybody hears it and gets it.

The Latin musical tradition is very rich and gives the singer a lot of freedom to explore a range of.

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

I'm not suggesting our music is the only music, but I am suggesting that there are certain elements in America's culture that are so precious that it would be a shame for them to go down the drain.

As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.

I love traditional music. But in any culture around the world, there is the historic and cultural music and everything that's been passed down and passed down, and hopefully you take that, and then you take it, you know, the next distance, and then somebody else takes it the next distance.

There were about 6,000 languages spoken on this planet at the beginning of the 20th century, there are probably only 600 still widely spoken at the beginning of the 21st century. Together with biodiversity, cultural and linguistic diversity are fading fast.

A nation creates music. The composer only arranges it.

The fallacies of the Melting Pot theory have also become obvious. Years before the war [WWI] it had become increasingly apparent that the Melting Pot was no longer successfully performing its function; that the American population was losing its homogeneous character; that various nationalities of recent immigrants were forming more and more compact racial "blocs," each bloc tenaciously maintaining its own racial character, customs, and traditions.

My audience has really become a very diverse group of people. It's not just 15-year-old girls. That's kind of what allows me to write from all the different places I want to write from.

I've got this diverse education, growing up in classical music and existing between that and music that is more visceral, so for sure, I've always been interested in music from other cultures.

The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore, the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.

I wanted to call it 'Experiment' because it's all kinds of different sounds. We have a bunch of instruments on there that are basically going extinct, like the fiddle, the steel guitar, the slide.

Listening to all these different musical genres from all over the world and listening to my father's record collection, the Irish folk influences from home. Of course they're all in there somewhere hiding within the lyrics and melodies. But rap music was the biggest influence on my way of writing and my performing.