musical essence Quotes

What I learned about music is that it can have nothing to do with words, instrumentation, image, message, or meaning. The meaning is the melody, the notes, the rhythm - music for the sake of its own beauty, with nothing more required to express itself.

My driving philosophy about making music is that you can reduce it all down to one note if that note is played with the right kind of sincerity.

The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it.

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.

'Circuital' was just so much about us as a band. We captured every song live, including the main vocal. That is probably my favorite My Morning Jacket record because it's really the essence of us being us. The solo record is just a completely different essence of just me trying to figure out stuff.

Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.

Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.

When I sing, it's the most solitary state: just me, and the microphone, and the holy spirit. It's not about notes or scales, it's all about emotion.

A work of art must make the rules: rules do not make a work of art...I tell people I am not a musician; I work with rhythms, frequencies and intensities...tunes are merely the gossips of music.

Music is the tonal reflection of beauty.

I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be in that particular spot...You have many things to pick from when you're playing, so you try to train yourself to pick out the best things that you know.

I find myself more genuinely drawn to the essence of Beethoven in Schnabel than I ever have been by anybody.

There is music in all things, if men had ears.

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

The melody is the most important thing that must stay in the minds of the people who listen to you. No matter how many notes you play, you can't let them forget what the song is.

Here's how I understand music. If you can play the same bunch of noise twice, it's music. To go beyond that is supercilious and pontificating.

Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It's eternally mysterious.

The way I see it, there's only one melody for any song.

I acted before I sang. And I did The Cosby Show, and things like that. But the music kind of came first. And it was a part of my essence. So I knew that I would evolve into this world.

I still feel like if I can get a song to work with, say, a basic beat, a rhythm, some chord changes, and a melody, a vocal melody - if it works with that, then I feel it's written and there's something there. So I intentionally don't get involved with arranging stuff or fussing over the sounds and the edits and the beats too much, at least not in the beginning, because I feel like then you can fool yourself that you've got something there, when you might not.

Music is about communication... it isn't just something that maybe physically sounds good or orally sounds interesting; it's something far, far deeper than that.

I was interested in maintaining the dignity and the hearts of the songs, letting them breathe and become what they are.

Let us not try to understand music with our mind. Let us not even try to feel it with our heart. Let us simply and spontaneously allow the music-bird to fly in our heart-sky. While flying, it will unconditionally reveal to us what it has and what it is. What it has, is Immortality's message. What it is, is Eternity's passage.

Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism.