W. H. Auden Quotes

Generally, I like Indian music because the melodies are usually not too complex, which is how I like music, and that's the way I write music.

I deal with more complex rhythmical patterns than a regular tap dancer. I even think in rhythms.

I like to keep things deceptively simple, but hard-hitting. You can reduce everything to the perfect, essential harmony. It's what used to be done with earlier music like Gregorian chants.

Dont call me a rapper, I’m an artist. Update your minds. I ‘INCORPORATE’ hip hop elements because I am part MC, but I am all things musical. All things melodically beautiful.

Melody and harmony are like lines and colors in pictures. A simple linear picture may be completely beautiful; the introduction of color may make it vague and insignificant. Yet color may, by combination with lines, create great pictures, so long as it does not smother and destroy their value.

Make your melodies simple enough so that the average person can hum them.

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

I love Judy Garland, I love Doris Day, I love Marilyn Monroe. I love everything that comes from that era. The music is just beautiful and powerful - and simple. That's what makes it so great.

The virtuoso element in jazz playing, all those very fast runs in the upper extremes, simply doesn't appeal to me. That's why I don't want to make my concerto "virtuosic" in the sense of a technical show-off. I want a beautiful sound and a melodic and lyrical line. I am more interested in the way someone can play musically.

There is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.

The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

I have not been immersed in music and life. I'm inspired by the simple things in life.

I hope people hear my songs and realize that writing music is kind of easy, or that taking your sadness and turning it into a beautiful song is worthwhile.

Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.

The beauty of a lovely woman is like music ... the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace.

All of the artists did such a beautiful job I can’t thank them enough. I’m just honored that 'God Only Knows' was chosen. 'God Only Knows' is a very special song. An extremely spiritual song and one of the best I’ve ever written.

I started to notice that simpleness is divine. I think we all start trying to use very complex harmonies and rhythms and all that because of a certain kind of ambition. But I was always trying to create something simple.

A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?

There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union.

Music is a fair and glorious gift of God. I am strongly persuaded that after theology, there is no art which can be placed on the level with music.

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.

jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.