Eduard Hanslick Quotes

In other words, I think that if an audience listens to something as an experience of how in tune it is or something of that kind, that the whole point is somehow being missed, and the music has failed.

When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.

I don't see music as working.

Can't you read? The score demands 'con amore', and what are you doing? You are playing it like married men!

I've always said that music is like literature.

I've always thought that the act of playing the guitar was the act of trying to make a point of playing the guitar.

I would spend hours absorbing every intonation, every inflection - how the singer would convey a sentiment and how it would sound coming out of their head. All of those things I very carefully watched and absorbed, and so I guess I was studying my whole life, although not in any sort of conventional way.

I learned a lot from hanging out with Emmylou Harris. One of the biggest pointers she gave me was that if you don't know the words, drop the consonants: that way, you'll hide the sound.

I love to zoom in and study why a chord is making me feel a certain way, but then I've learnt to zoom out again. Because if I'm not actually feeling it, there's not much point making it in the first place.

To try and create a transcendent state through music has always been the intention.

Everyone just wants to feel good, and I don't think that all music is designed to make you feel good.

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

A game master or teacher who was primarily concerned with being close enough to the "innermost meaning" would be a very bad teacher. To be candid, I myself, for example, have never in my life said a word to my pupils about the "meaning" of music; if there is one it does not need my explanations. On the other hand I have always made a great point of having my pupils count their eighths and sixteenths nicely. Whatever you become, teacher, scholar, or musician, have respect for the "meaning" but do not imagine that it can be taught.

I know not every song has to be a powerful message.

Being a musician enables a person to bend the notes and express things that are inside you, no matter what.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Each musical finds its own way.

Rhythm must have meaning.

In reality everybody has got musical thoughts. If you are able to overcome the part of it which is muscle training, which is what most musical playing actually is, performance actually is, is muscle training, and you are able to convert your ideas directly into music, you're a musician, too.

Then I began to play. Variations on a G major chord, the most wonderful chord known to mankind, infinitely happy. I could live inside a G major chord, with Grace, if she was willing. Everything uncomplicated and good about me could be summed up by that chord.

Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words

Nothing is more futile than theorizing about music. No doubt there are laws, mathematically strict laws, but these laws are not music; they are only its conditions? The essence of music is revelation.

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

To put it in my music, that's not the message I am trying to send out. That's not the type of artist I am trying to be.

How can you sing of Amazing Grace? How can you sing prayerfully of heaven and earth and all God's wonders without using your hands?