Music Research Quotes

People are beginning to recognize reggae music, and know it's a very powerful music, and researchers have been researching and coming up with reports that it's a great music, a healing music

And obviously, when I started out, I had a little bit more curiosity than some, and went seeking out the original artists, or in some cases searching up country music.

When I began playing the lute, in 1950 there were not too many lutenists around. I had to work hard, writing out music in museums and libraries. It was before the days of photocopying. And I had just picked up the lute, adapted my guitar technique to it and went from there.

I don't get to listen to music for fun very often; a lot of what I'm hearing is for work and isn't released yet.

As a songwriter, I feel like, just for inspiration and research purposes, I have to listen to everything.

I've studied rap in every borough.

I started putting down my own pen and spending some time searching for the best songs out there possible. It doesn't matter if I wrote them or not.

This is how much of a music geek I am: if I have a day with nothing to do, one of my favourite things is to just sit at my computer and make playlists of pretty much anything.

I was always looking for evidence of these common musical roots, but I was too young to know that what I was doing was called ethnomusicology.

My favorite moment of the whole thing was when John Belushi suggested that I get a hold of all the blues records I could so I could research the music.

In Berkley, they have academic studies on all genres of music including rock and jazz, but in India, we don't have serious academic research and studies on film music; it is such an interesting area of study.

Any club is important. All Latin music movements are born in clubs. There is no better research than going to a club. If your music works, it will bounce up.

Music is very important. It's important as a tool for learning, it can be a tool for healing, it can be no telling what, as long as we remain free to be able to create the music, to be able to experiment and to really research, and to really get time to develop the music.

Even as a kid, if I would come across something cool in the record store, that would be how I found out about bands. It's kind of the same way these days. In a way even less because there are no record stores to go to anymore.

What I saw in the record industry is it's just getting more restricted, more restricted, more restricted to where everyone's trying to figure out what kind of song to make to get on the radio: that's researched and where advertisers are telling you what to play.

I've always wanted to visit [Washington]. The Smithsonian has some fantastic archival material on blues music, which I'm really into. There's a ton of stuff I want to do there. but it just never happened.

My father was working on his Ph.D. on Danish choral music - the Danish choral music of Carl Nielsen - so over there to do research.

Because we grew up in Australia, to find information about a lot of blues guys, I used to go to the library and find the jazz magazines. They didn't even sell them at the time in news agents and stuff.

We might think that we're really intellectual and we're going to check out the library to research the meaning every time somebody puts out a new record. It's still primitive stuff. It's the same now as it was at the beginning. It's no different now. Rock 'n' roll is spirit music-it's just coming through people.

In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across.

Floating Points plays a lot of music that I don't know, and I like geeking out and trying to find out what the tracks are. His knowledge of house music is pretty deep, and his selection is just amazing. And I think it's a pleasure to listen to his music because it's so perfectly produced.

I just became obsessed with looking for new singers, unknown singers, people that maybe have been forgotten, and really checking them out and analyzing what they do - and obsessive listening. I think that's the core of my work on music - has been just listening to things and listening to singers.

I learned by transcribing songs out of the Library of Congress collection in Washington where I was working. I got a job when I just turned twenty in 1939 and Alan [Lomax] needed some help. I listened to hundreds of records every week.

There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

I read every book there was on jazz, about the original players - King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and all those groups. At one time I was fairly well schooled in that... I could tell you who played where and when, historically, way before my time.