Toru Takemitsu Quotes

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.

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.

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

I don't like to define my music. To me, music is pure emotion. It's language that can communicate certain emotions and the rhythms cuts across genders, cultures and nationalities. All you need to do is close your eyes and feel those emotions.

For a long time, I believed that a great piece of music on its own could do more to stir the soul than any other single art form.

Music has this emotional thing to it, and it touches people in crazy ways. The power of having that power is something that, once you have it, you don't want it to ever end.

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.

That's what I love about music. It's immediate. There's a connection whether you are playing at Hyde Park or Chicago, and it's been happening since the beginning of time and the troubadours.

Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don't understand the language that you're singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

No matter what language you speak, music can relate to you in some way, and when that 'Tip Toe' beat drops, it can instantly do something to you. It has the power to move you.

The whole deal with my music has been the emotional quality.

Once I heard how deep music could touch people and what it can make you feel and all of these emotions it could bring out, I was really fascinated with it all.

Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.

Pop music has greater power to change people and to affect people because it's a universal language. You don't have to understand music to understand the power of a pop song.

I grew up seeing my parents perform and sing, and I just always wanted to be singing, too. Music has always been my deepest passion and what I felt most connected to.

That was when I realised that music is the most profound, magical form of communication there is.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

Music is an emotion, and I put it out there.

I want to reach the people. This music is the people's music. It's music for your brain, for your heart, for your soul. That is what we always go to achieve. Soul united.

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

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 song is a lot of things. But, first of all, a song is the voice of its time. Setting words to music gives them weight, makes then somehow easier to say, and it helps them to be remembered.

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

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

Whenever you write music, you want it to touch people on a certain level. I mean, I've been reading tweets about 'Troublemaker' and people saying 'OMG, I can so relate to this - this is a guy that I fancy, or a girl that I fancy; it's exactly like this person.'