Architecture?
"You can't possibly hear the last movement of 'Beethoven's Seventh' and go slow."
--Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket
If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder. --Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland
I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
--Dimitri Mitropolous
God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
--Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player
Already too loud!
--Bruno Walter, at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments
Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
--Richard Strauss
If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.
--Pierre Beaumarchais, Author, The Barber of Seville
Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!
--Gioacchino Rossini
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
--Jerry Garcia
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
--Hunter S. Thompson
The record business is a bunch of nice guys competing for an honest buck.
--Leonard Chess
It's just a song! If I sing "Please Mr. Postman," that doesn't mean that you'll go out and deliver the mail!
--Rob Schneider, Saturday Night Live
I think that if someone goes out and kills someone because some shithead with a guitar tells them to, then they're shitheads themselves and they would have killed someone anyway.
--Pete Townsend
If you didn't have 20 or 30 panties hanging from your mike stand, you'd be thinking 'What am I doing wrong? Is my hair big enough?'
--Quiet Riot lead singer Kevin Debro
I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones.
--John Cage.
If you have a good guitar and a good amplifier, I believe that you can conquer the world.
-- Paul Stanley, Kiss
Rock music is mostly about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other in the back of your car.
--Unknown
Logic is the lowest form of magic.
--Cecil Taylor
Singing is the lowest form of communication. Why do they need new bands? Everyone knows that rock achieved perfection in 1974
--Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
It's OK if you only know three chords, but, God, put 'em in the right order.
--Hank Hill, King of the Hill
This is what happens to cultures that don't have any blues based rock to draw on.
--Craig Kilborn, Daily Show, on Dana International, Israeli singing superstar/transsexual
"Rhythm."
--Cecil Taylor, on what he believed that white people would never understand about black music
One ought to respect the artist's wishes, at least until he's dead.
--Marketing Director of CBS-UK about Bob Dylan
Payola was the greatest thing in the world. You didn't have to go to dinner with someone and kiss their ass, just pay them, here's the money, play the record -- fuck you.
--Hymie Weiss
I don't believe that there isn't anybody that isn't kind of an outcast. We wear our masks and our costumes to pretend that we're certain things, but I think we're all pretty scramble-headed when it comes right down to it. All of us are pretty desparate in certain ways.
--Terry Allen
Big companies don't take anyone on for musical reasons; music is an investment which has to pay back with interest. Nothing is needed to better the situation: who WANTS the industry to have anything to do with our work?
--Chris Cutler
I've been able to control my frenzy so I can teach and I can write poetry. I can work with it like a blacksmith. But a lot of young people don't know about that. They haven't traveled this far.
--Abiodun Oyewole, The Last Poets
Music is the universal language' is pure nonsense! Universal language? You try and put a Chinese record on a Nashville record station and see what happens. It's just baloney! I mean, it would be NICE, but music is just as much to be learned and understood as Chinese or French or Swahili.
--John Storm Roberts, Original Music label
I like the quality of four track. In a lot of instances, peoples' demos sounded a lot better than their finished product. We didn't want to put ourselves at the mercy of technology and sacrifice the integrity of the recording and the message.
--Lou Barlow, Sebadoh
We'd rather have 20 people like us for the right reasons than 200 people like us because we're the newest thing.
--Glenn Mercer, the Feelies