Music Appreciation Quotes

“While silently brooding, I am drawn to the start of a sweet melody that travels to my ear from afar. I smile, reminded that my heart can dance when my feet can't.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“[O]ften one listens and hears nothing, if it is a piece of music at all complicated to which one is listening for the first time. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played over to me two or three times I found that I knew it quite well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally ‘first hearings’ and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall, a minute afterwards, what one has just been saying to him. Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning. It was only that I had not, until then, heard a note of the sonata, whereas Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase that was as far beyond the range of my perception as a name which one endeavours to recall and in place of which one discovers only a void, a void from which, an hour later, when one is not thinking about them, will spring of their own accord, in one continuous flight, the syllables that one has solicited in vain. And not only does one not seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, but even in the content of any such work...it is the least valuable parts that one at first perceives.”
― Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove, Part 1

“There was an exceeding good concert, but too much talking to hear it well. Indeed I am quite astonished to find how little music is attended to in silence; for, though every body seems to admire, hardly any body listens.”
― Fanny Burney

“Jazz is about being in the moment.”
― Herbie Hancock

“Shout-out to musicians, singer-songwriters, and music artists just because... One love!”
― Stephanie Lahart

“I hardly have the words to analyse why I like or love a piece of music – I have words, of course, but a layman’s words, I don’t really know what a cadence is, let alone a Phrygian cadence or an augmented sixth.”
― Robert Dessaix, The Time of Our Lives: Growing Older Well

“. . . I was raised in a household shaped by what might be called Jewish ethical values, particularly the concept of tikkun, the healing or repairing of the world. I was taught to believe that working to achieve this transformation is what life is all about and that material possessions are utterly unimportant. I can still recall my father pointing to all the books and records in our house and saying ¨See these, these are the only riches that count.¨”
― Judy Chicago, Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist