How Music Works Quotes
"Music can get us through difficult patches in our lives by changing not only how we feel about ourselves, but also how we feel about everything outside ourselves."
"The joy of making music will find a way, regardless of the context and the form that emerges to best fit it."
"Genius—the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work—seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to its context."
"I’m proposing that this is not entirely the bad thing one might expect it to be."
"The emotional story—'something to get off my chest'—still gets told, but its form is guided by prior contextual restrictions."
"Music isn’t fragile. Knowing how the body works doesn’t take away from the pleasure of living."
"What is music good for? Why do we need music?"
"Funding future creativity is a worthy investment."
"I’ve been involved in music all my adult life. I didn’t plan it that way, and it wasn’t even a serious ambition at first, but that’s the way it turned out."
"How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it."
"This was done by having their gear on rolling platforms that were hidden in the wings."
"The magician would show how the trick was done and then do the trick, and my belief was that this transparency wouldn’t lessen the magic."
"There is another way in which pop-music shows resemble both Western and Eastern classical theater: the audience knows the story already."
"As a performing artist, this can be frustrating. We don’t want to be stuck playing our hits forever."
"You would never go to a movie longing to spend half the evening watching familiar scenes featuring the actors replayed, with only a few new ones interspersed."
"I had confidence that this bottom-up approach to making a show would work."
"The juxtaposition of music and image guides our minds and hearts so that, in the end, which came first doesn’t matter as much as one might think."
"The transparency and conceptual nature of its structure took away nothing from the emotional impact."
"In art museums a mixture of the known, familiar, and new is expected, as it is in classical concerts."
"Music tells us things—social things, psychological things, physical things about how we feel and perceive our bodies—in a way that other art forms can’t."
"Recordings aren’t time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it’s morning, noon, or the middle of the night."
"Music, and I’m not even talking about the lyrics here, tells us how other people view the world—people we have never met, sometimes people who are no longer alive."
"Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context."
"Recordings uproot music from their place of origin. They allow far-flung artists and foreign genres to be heard in other parts of the world."
"Recordings freeze music and allow it to be studied."
"I can’t believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it."
"Music has come to accommodate software, and I have to admit a lot has been gained as a result."
"As with Theremin and his instrument, the electric guitars were breaking free of history."
"The synthesizers that emerged in the seventies and early eighties were, like the theremin, unhooked from the provenance of musical culture and tradition."
"Mixtapes were a form of potlatch—the Native American custom by which a gift given requires that a reciprocal gift be received in the future."
"The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace."
"The sound of his voice is what makes them work. Jangly or wah-wah guitars became as much a part of a song as the lyric or top-line vocal melody."
"A recording by some previously obscure backwoods or southside singer can find its way into the ear of a wide public, and an Elvis, Luiz Gonzaga, Woody Guthrie, or James Brown, can suddenly have a massive audience—what was once a local style suddenly exerts a huge influence."
"Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature."
"If music was now accepted as a kind of property, then this hodgepodge version that disregarded ownership and seemed to belong to and originate with so many people (and machines) called into question a whole social and economic framework."
"Most of the music we were excited about came from outside the English-language pop-music axis."
"Pop music in many other countries, we discovered, came in wildly different flavors."
"It would be sort of like a Borges or Calvino story, but this would be a mystery in musical form."
"We both soon realized that the 'found vocal' idea might serve as the thread and theme that would pull the new record together."
"The lyrics would clearly not be derived from autobiographical or confessional material."
"The mind tends to find congruencies and links where none previously existed—not just in music, but in everything."
"Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike."
"The idea that musicians who appear to be 'down-home,' or seem to be conveying aspects of their own experience, must therefore be more 'real.'"
"The author can be the curator, the guiding sensibility, rather than the singer."
"We decided to use our usual instruments in new ways, and whatever materials happened to be lying about would be used for sound production."
"The amazing thing was how easy it was (well, relatively), and how much the vocals felt like they had been performed or 'sung' with the 'band.'"
"High-fidelity, we realized, was a vastly overrated convention that no one had bothered to question."
"Maybe songs can make an emotional case for inclusiveness and openness instead of just being critical."
"Granted, a writer has to draw on some instinctual understanding of a feeling in order to put something with some emotional truth down on paper."
"Sometimes music and visuals work together so seamlessly that it’s hard to imagine a theatrical work or a film without its score."
"The presence of ordinary folks, manifesting daily, thousands and thousands of them, tipped the scales."
"A magical and all too brief moment when class and other social differences vanish, and a common humanity becomes evident."
"Writing words to fit an existing melody... often resulted, surprisingly, in words that have an emotional consistency."
"Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more."
"Watching a performance and listening to music is always a participatory activity."
"Anything that occupies part of the conscious mind and distracts it, works."
"A collaboration with oneself, with one’s subconscious as well as with the collective unconscious."
"Music, as far as this book is concerned, is the end, and the devices that deliver it come and go."
"The music business is hardly even in the business of producing music anymore."
"Music was a handy cover for my social awkwardness, and I learned a thing or two about getting along."
"The ‘don’t give a shit’ attitude of the amateur is another precious commodity."
"Art is genius, and genius cannot belong to a profession."
"Musicians often don’t have pension plans, sad to say, so planning ahead can be critical."
"Music can permanently change people’s lives in ways that go far beyond being emotionally or intellectually moved."
"Music as social glue, as a self-empowering change agent, is maybe more profound than how perfectly a specific song is composed."
"The critics complained that teaching kids simple pop tunes was dumbing down their repertoire and would spell the death of classical music."
"The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things."
"A child's physical poverty is overcome by the spiritual richness that music provides."
"From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he is no longer poor."
"A similar program in the UK is called Youth Music, but the kids learn pop, jazz, and rap—not just the classics."
"The percentage of children who improved their reading by at least two levels in 2008–9 was 36 percent. For 2009–10, it was 84 percent."
"Creative problem solving is not taught in those other disciplines, but it is an essential survival skill."
"Although a teaspoon of Mozart may not make a child a better mathematician, there is little doubt that regular exposure to music may stimulate development of many different areas of the brain."
"Making art, Graef writes, can break the cycle of violence and fear."
"Creative problem solving can be learned, and is something that can be applied across all disciplines."
"We must bring about a music which is like furniture, a music which will be part of the noises of the environment."