Wynton Marsalis Quotes

I like how pure the expression is in music. You can go straight to the heart of an audience rather than through their brain.

I always start with emotion. That's where I start all of my improvisations, on the piano. I always start with the mood or the feel of where I am in that moment.

I don't play pyrotechnic scales. I play about frustration, patience, anger. Music is an extension of my soul.

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.

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.

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

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.

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.

Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music.

My music comes from my emotion, always.

Music is always a part of my characters' make-up.

When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it.

All my songs encapsulate a particular emotion.

I love music. I do play. It's like mathematics, and it's also emotional. It's nice to play, for no other reason than just to play.

I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy.

In the past, I have not been able to hear myself. I play with feeling so I need to hear what is coming out of the amplifier to inspire me; I don't just play mechanically.

I think that's my gift in this world is to put experience into music.

Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs.

Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.

My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

I've programmed myself musically to come up with love-feeling tracks that are romantic, sexy, but classy, all in one. And that's the challenge. Once I create that music, then the lyrical content starts to come - you know, the stories and things like that.