Musical Literacy Quotes

I wish I could write music notation. Even if I couldn't play it, I wish I could just write it.

I learned to read music before I learned to read script.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

I could read music before I could read words.

Music education opens doors that help children pass from school into the world around them - a world of work, culture, intellectual activity, and human involvement. The future of our nation depends on providing our children with a complete education that includes music.

I've never known how to read music in my life.

Rock stars are idiots. You know that! Remember this moron never went to music school, never learned music theory and can't read or write music. So why not be suspicious of everything this idiot says?

It's clear on the one hand that an education enriches and informs a response to beauty, even makes it possible in esoteric cases. On the other hand, there's no question that someone with no musical education whatsoever might wander into a concert hall and be overwhelmed by the 'Beethoven Pastoral Symphony'.

I could read music before I could read.

Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like 'new music,' 'avant-garde,' or something like that, I think it's like cutting out half the dictionary.

The future of our nation depends on providing our children with a complete education that includes music.

Someone who knows only music, understands nothing about it.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

One of the most beautiful things we can give our child is music education.

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.

Reading and writing music is a wonderful way of getting ideas in your head down to someone else who reads and writes, but if you don't read and write, and the other musician you're playing with are trying to express something who doesn't read and write, than it's a question of "I wrote" so that you must learn from listening and from understanding where that's coming from.

I'm a self-taught musician so how I read music is kind of very weak and I kind of read my own version of tablature, I write my own crappy reminders on what I'm playing.

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.

My reading of serious books about serious music is seriously compromised by the way that I can't understand any musical theory. Any mentions of D major or C minor are meaningless to me.

I don't like reading music. It's like learning a language. You can't read music proficiently overnight. It takes time, it's boring work.

If children are not introduced to music at an early age, I believe something fundamental is actually being taken from them.

The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.

I don't read music. Not even essentially. Not even nonessentially.

Truth of the matter is, I can't even read or write music.

Not being able to read and write music is not the same as being illiterate in speech and writing.