Musical Analysis Quotes

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you've got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart's music the way he played it and how he intended it. You've got to make it perfect, and that's not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!

People say I seem very negative about new music - well, if somebody asks me what I think of Keane, I'll tell 'em. I don't like 'em. I'll obviously take it a step too far and grossly insult the keyboard player's mam or summat, but I'm afraid that's just me.

I went to music school, and I guess I was a difficult, know-it-all type of student.

When I analyse the music, I can get really extreme.

My course is about really working on a sheet of music. You work out the chords, which note complements the other, and how they will make the feeling of tension, the feeling of resolution. It's all about harmonization. That's more of the theory of notation and everything rather than practical. I don't play any instrument.

I don't much listen to music as I study it: who's doing what, who wrote it.

What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music.

You can really walk around a song and completely, if it's a good song, look at it from a lot of different angles. Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin illustrated that perfectly.

I've always considered transcribing to be an invaluable tool in the development of one's musical ear and, over the years, I have spent countless glorious hours transcribing different kinds of music, either guitar-oriented or not.

I get the lyrics of a tune and interpret them my way.

A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music.

Dates and periods are of interest only to the student of musical history.

I knew I had to have a hit. I would get no more chances. Analyzing what they had in common I discovered they had many similar elements: harmonic rhythm, placement of the chord changes, choice of harmonic progressions, similar instrumentation, vocal phrases, drum fills, content, even the timbre of the lead solo voice. I decided to write a song that incorporated all these elements in one record.

We must have recourse to the rules of music when our genius and our ear seem to deny what we are seeking.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

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 sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

I had a lot of time to myself, and I would listen to a lot of music, mostly music that I knew fairly well and had a relationship with. And I'd think, well, what is it that I've never been able to do that this person or people are able to do with this song? Why haven't I been able to do it, and what can they do that I wish I could do? And then I'd try to do that. I'd start each day getting into the songs, and I'd think about how I might get closer to this music that I love, but haven't been able to make before.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.