Arnold Schoenberg Quotes

It's just a sound, and a feeling that's in the music. And you either hear it and appreciate it, or you don't.

Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do.

It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.

I've played in bands myself, and sat on the floor photographing some of the greatest bands in the world while they rehearse. What's always struck me is how different the sensory, especially auditory, experience is when you're in the middle of the music with the musicians playing off each other around you.

I love learning how people hear my music because everyone has different references.

My perception is that there is no distinction in music as many people perceive. The difference lies in the way you hear the music.

I was walking down the street with my friend and he said 'I hear music,' as though there's any other way to take it in. 'You're not special. That's how I receive it too... I tried to taste it, but it did not work'.

I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

Music is interior decoration.

Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.

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.

When I have been unhappy, I have heard an opera... and it seemed the shrieking of winds; when I am happy, a sparrow's chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy, but I that make it sweet.

If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies.

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

What's that sound I hear? It's just my lifetime It's whistling past my ear

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

I open my eyes and my ears, and that’s why I work.

Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.

As soon as one of my records goes on, it makes a vast portion of the public nervous. They get spooked by it. To some people who have ears to hear, it's a delightful, refreshing change. But to most of the public, it's a load of homemade-sounding nonsense.

To my eyes and ears the organ will ever be the King of Instruments.

Only to the rude ear of one who is quite indifferent does the song of a bird seem always the same.

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them

When I listen to the engine of my car, I might say it sounds fine, but it would not occur to me to say "What lovely music!

Play doesn't have to be a frivolous thing. You may think of a Beethoven symphony as something serious, but it's still being played. I think Oscar Wilde said that life is too important to be taken seriously.

If you don't have the possibility of listening to music, you can't know if you love it.