Classical Music Quotes

“If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.”
― Vera Nazarian

“Champagne arrived in flûtes on trays, and we emptied them with gladness in our hearts... for when feasts are laid and classical music is played, where champagne is drunk once the sun has sunk and the season of summer is alive in spicy bloom, and beautiful women fill the room, and are generous with laughter and smiles... these things fill men's hearts with joy and remind one that life’s bounty is not always fleeting but can be captured, and enjoyed. It is in writing about this scene that I relive this night in my soul.”
― Roman Payne

“I was fairly poor
but most of my money went
for wine and
classical music.
I loved to mix the two
together.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“Modern man is full of platitudes about living life to its fullest, with catchy keychain phrases and little plaques for kitchen walls. But if you've never retreated to the solitude of a dark room and listened to Beethoven's Ninth from start to finish, you know nothing. For music is a transcendental exploration of human emotion and experience, the very fabric of life in its purest form. And the Ninth our greatest musical achievement.”
― Tiffany Madison

“The 114 chakras, the 84 yoga poses and the 84 ragas of Indian classical music all work together to bring melody in life.”
― Amit Ray, 72000 Nadis and 114 Chakras in Human Body for Healing and Meditation

“Now that rock is turning 50, it's become classical itself. It's interesting to see that development.”
― Björk

“Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books, not everybody has to do it. Music is not for everybody.”
― Krzysztof Penderecki

“I'll bet playing classical music to plants would make them grow taller. When my ducks listen to Mozart, they become more cultured and have done things like taken up golf.”
― Jarod Kintz, To be good at golf you must go full koala bear

“Robert Kapilow is a born teacher, an enthusiast who can think on his feet, a 110 percent believer in the project at hand ... It’s a cheering thought that this kind of missionary enterprise did not pass from this earth with Leonard Bernstein. Robert Kapilow is awfully good at what he does. We need him.”
― Boston Globe

“If I tell her I like classical, I’ll solidify my position as a total nerd.”
― Aron Lewes, School For Spirits

“When natural music is
heightened and polished by art”, he said once, “there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent, (for it cannot be wholly seized or understood) the great and perfect wisdom of God in His marvellous work of music, in which this is most singular and indeed astonishing, that one man sings a simple tune or tenor (as musicians call it), together with which three, four or five voices also sing, which as it were
play and skip delightedly round this simple tune or tenor, and wonderfully
grace and adorn the said tune with manifold devices and sounds, performing as it were a heavenly dance, so that those who at all understand it and are moved by it must be greatly amazed, and believe that there is
nothing more extraordinary in the world than such a song adorned with many voices.”
― Martin Luther

“When natural music is heightened and polished by art, there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent (for it cannot be wholly seized or understood) the great and perfect wisdom of God in His marvellous work of music. In which this is most singular and indeed astonishing: that one man sings a simple tune or tenor (as musicians call it), together with which three, four, or five voices also sing, which, as it were, play and skip delightedly round this simple tune or tenor, and wonderfully grace and adorn the said tune with manifold devices and sounds, performing as it were a heavenly dance, so that those who at all understand it and are moved by it must be greatly amazed and believe that there is nothing more extraordinary in the world than such a song adorned with many voices.”
― Martin Luther

“Ironically, for all that youth culture rejects classical music as old-fashioned and out-ofdate, it is the way it is because of an excess of rational thought; it is, literally, too modern. Instead, youth culture yearns for a prerational immediacy, that of the body, of libidinal energy, and for the luxury of blind, adolescent emotions without consequences or responsibilities. Ironic, too, is that popular culture presents a prerational consciousness as the absolutely modern.”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“There is no inherent value in simply surrounding oneself with great music and art; what matters is the degree of exposure one is prepared to give, accompanied by the going out of the receptive mind, the active encounter with the object. The fetishism of art objects has not helped art’s cause at all. Attributing value to the object rather than the encounter underlies the arrogant dismissal of so many works. “If I don’t get it, it’s no good” is a mind-set that will never understand art because it fails to understand that art requires a humility and patience in the face of the object—and not mere passivity either, but an active opening of our responses.”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“Bring it. Just fucking bring it. Stand tall, Grandma Nora had told
him: he would stand tall, with the spotlights shining on his face, and
his music would pour into all their ears, and they would understand
that no matter what anybody threw at him, he was not going away He
was not stooping to their level. The air-conditioning could go off and
he could melt. They could toss any piece of crappy music they wanted
at him and he would play. He would not be ignored or denied or
embarrassed ever again: he was a musician, and music had no color.”
― Brendan Slocumb, The Violin Conspiracy

“I just felt a bit detached with piano. You know, you stare at the thing from above, like you're some kind of its superior or something. I don't like to feel like I'm intimidating it, you know? It's not like that with harp. Because I have to hug it, you know? I feel like I have to love it, to the point where it's capable of producing something beautiful.”
― Ziggy Zezsyazeoviennazabrizkie, San Francisco

“That night, as I lay in bed with “Rue des trois frères” by Fabrizio Paterlini playing on my turntable, her presence lingered in my thoughts, casting a gentle spell upon my mind. The memory of our conversation replayed like a melodic refrain, each word resonating within me. It was a feeling I had never experienced before, a mixture of intrigue, excitement, and a newfound sense of connection.”
― Asif Hossain, Serenade of Solitude

“She didn’t really like classical music and there was no Vince to whisper in her ear and tell her what was beautiful about it. His descriptions were so clear. Handel was all scarlet ostrich feathers and silk ribbons fluttering in the wind, great silver trays blazing with candlelight. Wagner was trees creaking and silk ribbons fluttering in the wind, great silver trays blazing with candlelight. Wagner was trees creaking and snapping in the storm, foam running up the foot of a cliff, waves sweeping round rocks, black peaks reaching to the sky. Vince was no longer there, it was only music with no introduction and no commentary.”
― Magda Szabó, Iza's Ballad

“You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.”
― Sydney Smith

“If Wagner's yearning endlessly seeks resolution, Scriabin is on a search for the yearning itself: Who needs a resolution when the longing provides such ecstasy?”
― Lincoln Ballard, The Alexander Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore

“As a contrast to the Bach of pure music I present the Bach who is a poet and painter in sound. In his music and in his texts he expresses the emotional as well as the descriptive with great vitality and clarity. Before all else he aims at rendering the pictorial in lines of sound. He is even more tone painter than tone poet. His art is nearer to that of Berlioz than to that of Wagner. If the text speaks of drifting mists, of boisterous winds, of roaring rivers, of waves that ebb and flow, of leaves falling from the tree, of bells that toll for the dying, of the confident faith that walks with firm steps or the weak faith that falters, of the proud who will be debased and the humble who will be exalted, of Satan rising in rebellion, of angels on the clouds of heaven, then one sees and hears all this in his music. Bach has, in fact, his own language of sound. There are in his music constantly recurring rhythmical motives expressing peaceful bliss, lively joy, intense pain, or sorrow sublimely borne. The impulse to express poetic and pictorial concepts is the essence of music. It addresses itself to the listener's creative imagination and seeks to kindle in him the feelings and visions with which the music was composed. But this it can do only if the person who uses the language of sound possesses the mysterious faculty of rendering thoughts with a superior clarity and precision. In this respect Bach is the greatest of the great.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“Because of the continuity of its tone, which can be maintained as long as desired, the organ has in it an element of the eternal. Even in a secular room it cannot become a secular instrument.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“Classical music and pure mathematics get trapped in their own history, their own self-awareness, their own high standards.”
― Lloyd N. Trefethen, TREFETHEN'S INDEX CARDS: FORTY YEARS OF NOTES ABOUT PEOPLE, WORDS AND MATHEMATICS

“The works that Johann Sebastian Bach has left us, are a priceless national heritage, of a kind that no other race possesses.”
― Johann Nikolaus Forkel

“... and this man, the greatest musical poet and the greatest musical rhetorician that has ever existed, and probably that ever will exist, was a German. Be proud of him, oh Fatherland, be proud of him, but also be worthy of him!”
― Johann Nikolaus Forkel

“The fact that the work today has become common property may console us for the other fact that an analysis of it is almost as impossible as it is to depict a wood by enumerating the trees and describing their appearance. We can only repeat again and again—take them and play them and penetrate into this world for yourself. Aesthetic elucidation of any kind must necessarily be superficial here, What so fascinates us in the work is not the form or the build of the piece, but the world-view that is mirrored in it. It is not so much that we enjoy the Well-tempered Clavichord as that we are edified by it. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter—to all these it gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“The century of airplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.”
― Claude Debussy

“I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.”
― Claude Debussy

“Music, being identical with heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It's a condition of eternity.”
― Gustav Holst, Gustav Holst, letters to W. G. Whittaker

“Music is the outward and audible signification of inward and spiritual realities.”
― Peter Warlock, Saudades / Peter Warlock. 1923 [Leather Bound]