M quotes

View Quote We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.

View Quote Wynton Marsalis in Smithsonian Magazine, November 2005.

View Quote Music is reflection of self, we just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail.

View Quote Marshall Mathers, "Sing For the Moment", The Eminem Show (2002), Universal Music Group North America

View Quote Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential.

View Quote Susan McClary, quoted in Sullivan, Meg (May 2002). Spotlight: Susan McClary, Musicologist.

View Quote Of what use is musical knowledge? Here is one idea. Each child spends endless days in curious ways; we call this play. A child stacks and packs all kinds of blocks and boxes, lines them up, and knocks them down. … Clearly, the child is learning about space! ... how on earth does one learn about time? Can one time fit inside another? Can two of them go side by side? In music, we find out!

View Quote Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and Meaning" (1981).

View Quote Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.

View Quote Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and Meaning" ibid.

View Quote We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.

View Quote Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and Meaning" ibid.

View Quote Music makes things in our minds, but afterward most of them fade away. What remains? ...perhaps what we learn is not the music itself but a way of hearing it.

View Quote Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and Meaning" ibid.

View Quote All aspects of musical practice may be disengaged, and privileged, in order to give birth to new forms of variation: variations on the relationships between the composer and the performer, between the conductor and the performer, between the performers, between the performer and the listener, variations upon gestures, variations on silence that end in a mute music that is still music because it preserves still something of the musical totality of the tradition...all elements belonging to the total musical fact may be separated and taken as a strategic variable of musical production. This autonomization serves as true musical experimentation: little by little, the individual variables that make up a total musical fact are brought to light. Any particular music then appears as one that has made a choice among these variables, and that has privileged a certain number of them. Under these conditions, musical analysis would have to begin by recognizing the strategic variables characteristic of a given musical system: musical invention and musical analysis lend each other mutual aid.

View Quote Jean Molino quoted in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Abbate, Carolyn (translator) (1987 (original), 1990 (translation)). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. pp. 42–43. ISBN 0691027145. 

View Quote Being in a band is really great when you're 20. When you're 30, it's kind of 'Spinal Tap,' and when you're 40, it's just pathetic.

View Quote Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, quoted in "Make a Myth, Whip It Good". New York Times. 2001-04-18.