{"id":162591,"date":"2025-08-07T13:34:48","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T13:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.english-culture.com\/?p=162591"},"modified":"2026-03-08T16:21:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T15:21:57","slug":"thoughts-and-reflections-on-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.english-culture.com\/thoughts-and-reflections-on-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts and reflections on music"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Thoughts<\/a>
Thoughts and reflections on music<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thoughts and reflections on music, an article with great analysis by famous authors and musicians on the deep inner value and importance of music for our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.<\/span>
\nJean Genet<\/span><\/p>\n

Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.<\/span>
\nHenri Frederic Amiel<\/span><\/p>\n

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan’s Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.<\/span>
\nSteven Halpern<\/span><\/p>\n

Sed et anima hominis symphoniam in se habet et symphonizans est, unde etiam multotiens plantus educit, cum symphoniam audit, quoniam de patria in exilium se missam meminit. (But the soul of man also has a symphony within itself and is a symphonist, from which it also often brings forth plants when it hears a symphony, since it remembers that it has been sent into exile from its homeland.)<\/span>
\nHildegard von Bingen<\/span><\/p>\n

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.<\/span>
\nSir John Herschel<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, to curry favor with the younger generations, the Pope has decided, among other things, to become the megaphone of rock stars and starlets, once the devil’s music. And so even the old rebel Bob Dylan will play for the pontiff, not for free, of course, but only for the modest sum of five hundred thousand euros.<\/span>
\nCarl William Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Reflections<\/a>
Reflections and thoughts on music<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.<\/span>
\nClaude Levi-Strauss<\/span><\/p>\n

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skilful than our own.<\/span>
\nClaude Levi-Strauss<\/span><\/p>\n

A friend of mine, when he heard I was writing a book about stupidity, said to me, \u201cYou know, to increase your productivity, you should listen to music.\u201d I asked him what kind of music, and smiling he confidently replied, \u201cA little bit of everything is more than fine.\u201d<\/span>
\nCarl William Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn’t just ours — it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can’t beat it.<\/span>
\nGreil Marcus<\/span><\/p>\n

The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.<\/span>
\nEzra Pound<\/span><\/p>\n

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and lifestyle. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.<\/span>
\nGeorge Steiner<\/span><\/p>\n

Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you’re always going to find a hip-hop tape; that’s all I buy, that’s all I live, that’s all I listen to, that’s all I love.<\/span>
\nEminem<\/span><\/p>\n

September 1998. Lucio Battisti dies, a great poet who, through his songs, even managed to give a certain dignity to banality. He was a musical beacon for many generations, and even Carl William Brown paid him a great tribute in the distant 1980s by purchasing a compilation of Battisti’s greatest hits, made in Naples, from a Moroccan in a bar in Brescia.<\/span>
\nCarl William Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Best<\/a>
Best reflections on music<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.<\/span>
\nWilliam Congreve<\/span><\/p>\n

The conductor begins to move from where the composer, the genius, left off. The most important thing is to serve the music, and serve it with love. An “act of love,” very close to an act of faith, one might say. The conductor as servant. However, at the moment of performance, the situation changes. “At that moment, the composition belongs to me. You have to be deeply convinced that this is the only way to interpret it, that this is the truth.” Because, in turn, the performance then represents who you are as a person. I have to be fully involved, feeling that that work belongs to me, to my life, heart, and body, as much as to my mind.”<\/span>
\nCarlo Maria Giulini<\/span><\/p>\n

The servant of genius is himself a genius artist. The most important thing is to serve the music, and serve it with love. An “act of love” that interpret life as art, and art as life, and you can’t deny that Kriss Drummer is an extremely lively girl.<\/span>
\nCarl William Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn’t exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.<\/span>
\nMichelle Branch<\/span><\/p>\n

There have existed, and still exist, despite the disruptions that civilization brings, small, delightful peoples who learned music with the simplicity with which one learns to breathe. Their conservatory is: the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand small noises attentively perceived, without ever resorting to arbitrary treatises.<\/span>
\nClaude Debussy<\/span><\/p>\n

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly… music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.<\/span>
\nAndres Segovia<\/span><\/p>\n

There can be no musical instrument that does not mix pure sound, which consists only of the vibrations of the air, with an extraneous addition, due to the vibrations of the material from which it is made. These vibrations, by their impulse, cause those of the air and produce a minimal accessory sound, so that each sound receives its specific character: thus, for example, what distinguishes the sound of the violin from that of the flute. But the less this accessory mixture, the purer the sound: this is why the human voice has the purest sound, since there is no artificial instrument that can equal the natural instrument.<\/span>
\nArthur Schopenhauer<\/span><\/p>\n

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.<\/span>
\nBenjamin Britten<\/span><\/p>\n

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What’s the buzz on the street with the kids? She’s going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren’t into Kiss. But they’ve all been told that it’s the greatest show on Earth.<\/span>
\nAce Frehley<\/span><\/p>\n

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.<\/span>
\nBruce Beresford<\/span><\/p>\n

Times were changing. Clothes were changing. Morals were changing. We went from romantic loves songs like I used to do to rock ‘n roll. Now that has changed to rap. So, there’s always a new generation with new music.<\/span>
\nBobby Vinton<\/span><\/p>\n

He who cannot rely on any music within himself, and cannot be moved by the harmonious harmony of sweetly modulated sounds, is ready for treachery, deceit, and robbery: the motions of his soul are dark as night, and his affections as dark as Erebus. Let no one ever trust such a man.<\/span>
\nWilliam Shakespeare<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Famous<\/a>
Famous reflections on music<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the wine taste richer, the laughter ring louder because they are there.<\/span>
\nJudith Viorst<\/span><\/p>\n

The works of all truly capable minds are distinguished from others by their characteristic of decisiveness and determination, along with the qualities that derive from them, namely perspicuity and clarity, because such minds always knew precisely <\/span>and clearly what they wanted to express – whether in prose, verse, or musical notes.<\/span>
\nArthur Schopenhauer<\/span><\/p>\n

I have never watched a whole concert in my life, nor a musician playing for more than ten minutes without getting bored, what’s more I have never liked heavy metal music or estremely hard rock, but with Kriss Drummer is different, she is extremely magnetic and charismatic. Someone told me to let Kriss be my gateway drug, but as an old metaphorical witchdoctor I must admit that I only used dangerous substances when I was much younger.<\/span>
\nCarl William Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

What does it mean to have musical feeling? You don’t have it if you play your piece from beginning to end with great difficulty, anxiously staring at the written notes, or if you stop abruptly in your performance, completely unable to continue, if someone accidentally turns two pages at once. But you undoubtedly possess this musical feeling if, while playing a piece that is completely new to you, you roughly guess what follows, or know it by heart if the piece is already known to you; in a word, if you have music not only in your fingers, but also in your head and heart.<\/span>
\nRobert Schumann<\/span><\/p>\n

The essence of music is to awaken in us that mysterious foundation (inexpressible by literature and in general by all finite modes of expression, which use either words and consequently ideas, specific things, or specific objects – painting, sculpture) of our soul, which begins where the finite and all the arts that have the finite as their object stop, where science stops, and which can therefore be called religious.<\/span>
\nMarcel Proust<\/span><\/p>\n

The ear, the organ of fear, could only develop as richly in the night and semi-darkness of dark forests and caves as it did, according to the way of life of the age of fear, that is, the longest human age ever. During the day, the ear is less necessary. Hence the character of music, as an art of the night and semi-darkness.<\/span>
\nFriedrich Nietzsche<\/span><\/p>\n

This book is nothing more than a pilgrim’s journey to the sanctuary of stupidity. He’s not in good company, so he listens to the advice of the wise men of the past and a bit of rebellious, melancholic music. The pitfalls are many, but he isn’t afraid; he’s not a worshipper, much less a flatterer; on the contrary, he’s a destroyer.<\/span>
\nCarl William Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

It is through music that the West reveals its true nature and reaches its depths. If the West has not created a wisdom or a metaphysics entirely its own, nor even a poetry that can be said to be unparalleled, it has, however, projected into its musical productions all its original force, its subtlety, its mystery, and its capacity for the ineffable.<\/span>
\nEmil Cioran<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing that makes music beautiful is that you never reach perfection. So every night I ask myself: how am I going to approach that song? How can I make the most of it? Sometimes something goes wrong so you have to try again. One day you discover something new, a new feeling. It’s beautiful.<\/span>
\nZiggy Marley<\/span><\/p>\n

If one could give a perfectly exact, complete, and detailed explanation of music – that is, if one could reproduce in concepts point by point what it expresses – one would certainly also have an adequate conceptual reproduction and explanation of the world […], that is, true philosophy.<\/span>
\nA. Schopenhauer<\/span><\/p>\n

Pop music is a lullaby. After all, look how young people sway when they listen to it: they lull themselves to sleep […] Think of those young people who prepare for exams to the sound of rock ‘n’ roll: their parents think the radio is keeping them from studying, and they take it away; the kids then become truly incapable of studying. They can complete that work as adults only if they aren’t deprived of the childhood gratifications they need.<\/span>
\nB. Bettelheim<\/span><\/p>\n

A melody is a set of successive sounds of varying pitch, each having a relationship such that their overall perception is capable of satisfying both the intellect and the senses. This linear, horizontal aspect of music contrasts with the vertical aspect of sets of simultaneous individual sounds, or chords, whose formation and concatenation constitute harmony.<\/span>
\nG. Ferchault<\/span><\/p>\n

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