“Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.”
“Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.”
“Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.”
“, I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.”
“She was one of those people who said ''I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.''”
“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
“Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.”
“Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.”
“Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.”
“Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.”
“It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.”
“Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.”
“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.”
“'Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean, to be entreated, either to begin or end.”
“People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.”
“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.”
“Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.”
“It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.”
“Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.”
“All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!”
“I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.”
“Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.”
“I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.”
“If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.”
“True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.”
“There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.”
“The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.”
“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”
“Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.”
“A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.”