Simon McBurney Quotes

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

It's always interesting to me that we all hear music differently. It's an awesome experience to hear what other people hear.

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.

You can say what you think music is, but the only way it really is, is how people experience it.

Either your understanding of the meaning of music is there from the beginning or it is not.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

Everyone hears a song a different way and hears timing a different way.

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.

Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.

Some people think electronic music is cold, but I think that has more to do with the people listening than the actual music itself.

The level on which Japan seems to have picked up on my music seems to be on a more abstract level.

I just enjoy the sound as I hear it in everything around me. The high and low frequencies of sound bewitch me. Whether I am in a shop, in the bathroom or listening to noise that my fans make... everything is music to my ears and drives me. I just put all these things in rhythm when I'm playing.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.

The beauty of music is that everyone hears it their own way, and every song you hear leaves an impression on you that alters the way you hear everything from that point on.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

People have taught me not to look for intelligence in rockmusic.

Sometimes people talk about music, whether blogs or magazines, in a strange way where it doesn't seem like they're actually listening to it.

We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

I knew all this Beatles music. I knew the songs phonetically. It was like my whole experience of that music was out of focus, and somebody put the perfect glasses on me, and all of a sudden I could see everything.

If an apprentice does not hear what a master hears, is then that quality not present in the music? Yes and no. In the world in which the apprentice lives no.