I don't much listen to music as I study it: who's doing what, who wrote it.
When they invented the mandolin, it was as if they were trying to come up with the least efficient means of extracting noise from a piece of wood.
To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.
I survived a number of garage bands during my teens and early twenties, both as drummer and guitarist. It's nigh impossible for me to listen to music without parsing it.
When I saw 'Chess' in London, I thought it was horrible. It was so static. People were coming down front and just facing the audience, singing.
I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.
What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?
Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.
Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
A guitar is just theoretically built wrong. Each string is an interval of fourths, and then the B string is off. Theoretically, that's not right, all the strings should be off.
'The Last Five Years' was a musical in 2002, and it's a deconstruction of a marriage.
A verbose, prosaic review which mentions whistling winds and the timeless feeling of jade doesn't mean anything to me; I don't need a novella telling me about how an album is like a fine meal.
...If I continued to harbour any hope for music it lay in the expectation that a musician might come who was sufficiently bold, subtle, malicious, southerly, superhealthy to confront that music and in an immortal fashion take revenge on it.
