Quotes About Expression

According to the science writer Philip Ball, when it was pointed out to musicologist Deryck Cooke that Slavic and much Spanish music use minor keys for happy music, he claimed that their lives were so hard that they didn't really know what happiness was anyway.

Still, making music is its own reward.

I would hope very much that the converse of that myth isn't true - that one does not have to be nuts to be creative.

Walter Murch, the sound editor and film director, said, "Music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved

Watch me work! Watch me work! Watch me work!

The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.

Yale, pointed out that once you let yourself see things this way, lots of things become "musical scores"—although they might never have been intended to be played.

The dead guys won't write more symphonies.

with jazz and folk musicians, everything was expected to be thrown into the crucible of a gig to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew.

where music is heard can determine the sort of music created by the artists who perform there.

no one has ever gone to war over music.

Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify.

the space, the platform, and the software "makes" the art, the music, or whatever.

temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings.

Creativity doesn't "improve.

Every outfit carries cultural baggage of some kind. It took me a while to get a handle on this aspect of performance.

emerged from dance-oriented early hip-hop (which, like jazz, evolved by extending the breaks for dancers), it's morphed into something else entirely: music that sounds best in cars. People do dance in their cars, or they try to.

Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

Music isn't fragile.

In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

coming. Our friendship—the nascent journalist and the wizened asphalt guy hanging out—was one small expression of the pub theory of life, that we are all of a common fabric once we have a pint in our hands. Or, by extension, a line of coke between us.

And because I had been in some tight corners before and had known real fear, if I found something that was true, I was happy to just write it up and deal with the fallout. No big.