Musical Aesthetics Quotes

I'm a guy who doesn't know the name of the chord, but I know that it sounds good.

People sometimes say that bands sound like The Cars, but when I hear it I don't know if they do or not.

It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion.

I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.

Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?

I'm guilty of being perceived as having narrow taste. I went after the artists that I thought were important - Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and stuff.

I like working with sound; sound and rhythm. I like the abstract more than "What does that mean?" Nobody ever says to you, "Why did you use a harmonium?" Or "What is that ringing sound that occurs here?" The questions are always "What does that song mean?" or "What were you trying to say here?"

Music truely has to all other arts the same relation as religion to the church.

I don't actually personally get off on guitar music.

I'm not a great lover of Madonna's voice. She's done very well with what she's got, and I'm sure my voice turns her right off, but she's not my favourite singer.

I know when I started I would have been happy to sound like the Beatles or Joe Tex or whoever. You want to sound like most bands, you want to sound like their records and that's how you learn your chops.

Did Wagner really accomplish the first step towards the kitschy 'fetishization' of music that reaches its apogee in classical Hollywood?

Music is made up out of these building blocks. Studying how these blocks go together and what they consist of and the math of how it works - it's all the same stuff; it's just different aesthetics that we're talking about.

I can't even read music. All I know is whether I think it sounds good and if I like what I'm doing.

I never could get into The Chambers Brothers. They make good records, but I never could get behind it.

Some people love some music, and they hear it a year later and they think, 'What was I thinking?'

Reading music is like listening to flowers. I don't understand the concept.

The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

Seattle isn't known for a particular production sound, so that leaves a lot of great producers in Seattle doing kind of their own thing. And I think, for me, I was probably enough removed from hip-hop that my style was even a little bit weirder than that.

There are beautiful sounds in rock. Very lazy, dreamlike noises. You can forget about the lyrics in most songs. Just dig the noise, and you've got your sound...We're musical primitives.

I'm kind of the town pump. I think I have a pretty good ear for what sounds good in this style.

Older audiences are hard to win over. They're very specific in their tastes and critical of new music.

To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists. The planets have the sun, the earth, the moon.

In elaborating how "philosophy by showing" works, and in defending the idea that literature and music can contribute to philosophical "showing", I am also doing something more standardly philosophical. But I view most of the book as an interweaving of philosophy and literary criticism. If that entails a broadening of a standard idea of philosophy, it's a broadening I'd like to see happen.