Musical Silence Quotes

It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

Lay down the song you strum, And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings No voice can hope to hum.

The hardest thing with musicians is getting them not to play.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.

When you're making music or playing a song, I find the moments when there are no instruments being played even stronger than when they are being played. Because they add tension. It's also an ego-less thing - a place where you have no ego - when you're with a bunch of musicians who stop and listen instead.

The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand.

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

Silence can be very effective, and it gives the music space to breathe.

Before music there was silence and the duet format allows you to build from the silence in a very special way.

In the three years that nobody heard music from me, I made more music than I've ever made.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

I started performing very young as a salsa dancer, and every time I was on that stage dancing, all I knew was that I wanted to speak. I wanted the music to stop, and I wanted to speak.

In my own life, I had gone from Maryland State Honors Chorus and writing and singing my own songs to a musical silence. It seemed the busier my work life would get, the less I had to feed the other parts of my own soul, including the arts.

If you are involved with the intensity of crescendo situations, with the intensity of tragedy, you might begin to see the humor of these situations as well. As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.

There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.