Musical Imagery Quotes

It's really hard for me to finish a song unless I have a strong visual in my head while I'm writing it.

When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.

If I can't get a mental image from the song, I won't sing it.

When I was writing 'Shotgun,' it's one of the first songs that's come to me as an image.

When I was little, my mum would take me to see the orchestra, tell me to close my eyes and think about the story the music was telling. I always spoke about colours. I'd talk about how purple the oboe was.

I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'

One of the more distant concerns is with the visual interpretation of the music. I find it fascinating but I don't always particularly get involved with it.

Do you think I'm wandering around all day thinking, 'I must write a song called 'Three Coins In The Fountain'?' Only an idiot would do that.

I wanted to write picture music ever since I was a kid.

The mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is not related to the striking of individual keys but rather to the rites of passage between notes.

I see what I want of Love... I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our shadow behind this dispossessed place... I see what I want of people: their desire to long for anything, their lateness in getting to work and their hurry to return to their folk... and their need to say: Good Morning.

I've always said the bass just happens to be the crayon I picked out of the box. I'd still be drawing the same pictures... should I have picked trumpet or accordion or guitar, whatever it may be. The sounds in my head are still the same.

The state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music. That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representation of the desired soundscape.

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist...and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, every so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resoundingbells....By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.

I go to a very visual place when I'm singing. It's very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that.

I'd have these weird experiences where I'd just be walking down the street with this chord progression in my head, this happened more than a few times, and I'd walk home and find a fax in my machine and it would match the music in my head.

Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.

Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.

I don't think I approach my songs differently from other artists. You get a big picture of it, and you imagine the song and hear and feel it, and that big picture is like a snapshot, and it comes to you as fast as it takes to click a camera.

When I'm writing instrumental music, I try to find musical and non-musical inspirations.

Music is completely not reality. There's nothing about music that has any meaning at all. A lot of people disagree with that, but it's basically true. You can listen to a piece of music, and fifteen people will give you fifteen answers of what it's about.

I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time.

When I make music, it's a very visual thing. Conjures up a lot of images.