Music is a truly universal language. Some say mathematics is universal, but that is only because it can be understood across cultural boundaries. Like spoken languages, though, one has to be skilled at math to really understand it. Music, on the other hand, can be appreciated without the skill to create it.
I've seen a sign that says we all smile in the same language (maybe more on this later). This, too, is not true. Every smile means something different. Sure, smiling generally means you are, or are pretending to be, happy. However, we are each made happy by different things. We're all familiar with the evil grin always possessed by the crazy bad guy in any number of movies. This obviously means something completely different from the joyous smiles on the faces of good guys.
Once again, though, music transcends this type of individualism. True, we may not have the same understanding of a song as somebody else does, and everybody has certain songs with a much deeper meaning to them than to others, but we all hear the same things. Anybody can tell a sad song from a happy one, without any knowledge of major versus minor keys and differences in rhythm and instrumentation.
Even though the spoken words may be unintelligible to don't understand that verbal language, we do, in a way, all sing in the same language. This language is the language of music. Subtle ironies contained within the lyrics themselves may be lost to people who don't understand them, but we don't need to know Gaelic to feel sad upon hearing an Irish ballad, and knowledge of Spanish is unnecessary for grasping the upbeat nature of salsa music.
I could go on like this for a while, but I don't think I could describe music any better than musicians and philosophers already have. The following quotes were compiled by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart in the book "Spirit into Sound," and deal with nearly every imaginable aspect of music:
Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there is a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
- Charlie Parker
What's swinging in words? If a guy makes you tap your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don't have to ask anybody if that's good music or not. You can always feel it.
- Miles Davis
The drive to create, perform, and reproduce music is common to all mankind, a drive so basic that when a man cannot find an instrument to suit him, he creates his own.
- Joseph Howard
God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way!
- Arturo Toscanini, speaking to his orchestra)
It isn't evil that's running the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.
- Ned Rorem
When you play from your heart, all of a sudden there's no gravity. You don't feel the weight of the world, of bills, of anything. That's why people love it. Your so-called insurmountable problems disappear, and instead of problems you get possibilities.
- Carlos Santana
It took me twenty years of study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen to five minutes and understand it.
- Miles Davis, about a woman in the audience who complained that she didn't understand what he was playing.
I'm not very good technically, but I can make it fuckin' howl and move.
- John Lennon
My music is best understood by children and animals.
- Igor Stravinsky
You know, I'm starting to feel pretty good. I know I've written some classic songs that someday are going to be elevator music, and that makes me feel pretty good.
- Christopher Cross
When I'm playing, I'm in the now, and I experience how I'm feeling right there onstage, and sometimes I'm able to get into a state of 100% bliss. It's really a joyous, serene place.
- Bill Kreutzmann
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Berthold Auerbach
I'd like to think that when I sing a song, I can let you know all about the heartbreak, struggle, lies and kicks in the ass I've gotten over the years for being black and everything else, without actually saying a word about it.
- Ray Charles
When it came to dollars, everyone got uptight. Probably the biggest bring down in my life was being in a pop group and finding out just how much it was like everything it was supposed to be against.
- Mama Cass Elliot
Real music is not for wealth, not for honors or even for the joys of the mind . . . but as a path for realization and salvation.
- Ali Akbar Khan
Think NOTHING
Wait until it is absolutely still within you
When you have attained this
Begin to play
As soon as you start to think
STOP.
And try to retain
The state of NON-THINKING
Then continue playing.
- Karlheinz Stockhausen
There are two things John and I always do when we're going to sit down and write a song. First of all we sit down. Then we think about writing a song.
- Paul McCartney
The composer,
as in old China,
joins Heaven
and Earth
with threads
of sounds.
- Alan Hovhaness
To sing is to love and affirm,
to fly and to soar,
to coast into the hearts of the people who listen,
to tell them that life is to live,
that love is there,
that nothing is a promise,
but that beauty exists,
and must be hunted for and found.
- Joan Baez
We look for new sonorities, new intervals, new forms. Where it will lead, I don't know. I don't want to know. It would be like knowing the date of my death.
- Pierre Boulez
Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays. She is beautiful and gentle. She is beautiful and gentle. She is a swinger. She has grace. To hear her speak, you can't believe your ears. She is ten thousand years old. She is as modern as tomorrow, a brand new woman every day. Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.
- Duke Ellington
The public doesn't want new music; the main thing that it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
- Arthur Honegger
Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.
- Leo Tolstoy
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
- Henry David Thoreau
If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.
- Ned Rorem
We had played through our personal repertoire of clichés and facile "licks" and had transcended the notes, entering another space entirely, discovering once again that the song is only a door or a passageway to one of many elemental worlds of music.
- Mickey Hart
Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as to the world of sound what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning.
- Edith Sitwell
The earth forms the body of an instrument, across which strings are stretched and are tuned by a divine hand. We must try once again to find the secret of that tuning...
- R. Murray Schafer
He who lets his breath, hence his life force, flow consentingly as a willing sound sacrifice from the depths of his body, sings his life; for singing means to affirm life, to free oneself, and thereby to bring happiness and prosperity to oneself, and consequently to one's fellow men.
- Marius Schneider
Today we hear so much musical sound all the time, in trains, in airplanes, in restaurants, that we are becoming deadened to it. Our sensitivity to music is in danger of being lost, just as we are becoming insensitive to the stupid brutality we see so much on television or in motion pictures. Still, we are able to turn off television, or walk out of a bad motion picture or a poor concert. You can't walk out of an airplane.
- Leopold Stokowski
Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. . . . That we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand, from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. . . . Song shows us a world that is worthy of the world.
- Salman Rushdie
Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, it expresses the deepest thoughts of life.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
You can't go by what the preacher say because he and the bluesman looking for the same thing--some money, some chicken, and a nice-looking woman.
- James "Son" Thomas
I never even heard any song called a folk song. After all, every song is a song by folks and for the folks. I don't recall ever writing any songs for cows, chickens, fish, monkeys, nor wild animals of any kind.
- Woody Guthrie
Thus it came to pass that jazz multiplied all over the face of the earth and the wriggling of bottoms was tremendous.
- Peter Clayton
Sound is an event:
by its coming it breaks an original silence,
and it ends in a final silence.
Music is born,
develops,
and realizes itself within silence:
upon silence it traces out its moving arabesques,
which give a form to silence
and yet do not abolish it.
- Gisèle Brelet
In the beginning was silence, womb of all words which all words seek, mother of these: breath of my life . . . Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.
- Stephen Millhauser
The voice is not only indicative of man's character, but it is the expression of his spirit. Other sounds can be louder than the voice, but no sound can be more living.
- Inayat Khan
Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song. These are the occasions when the bolts of the universe fly open and we are given a glimpse of what is hidden. . . . Glory bursts upon us in such hours: the dark glory of earthquakes, the slippery wonder of new life, the radiance of . . . singing.
- Salman Rushdie
Where I come from we say that rhythm is the soul of life, because the whole universe revolves around rhythm, and when we get out of rhythm, that's when we get into trouble.
- Babatunde Olatunji
No human culture has ever existed without music.
Music is a necessity. It is not just for survival or for entertainment.
Music makes us human.
- Mickey Hart
Songs are a map of people's experiences, and that's the way you connect to them.
- Stephen Feld
Of the many domains of culture, music would perhaps seem to be one of the least necessary; yet we know of no culture that does not have it.
- Bruno Nettl
My essential purpose in singing is to help the listener understand reality.
- Pete Seeger
The superior man tries to promote music as a means to the perfection of human culture. When such music prevails, and people's minds are let towards the right ideals and aspirations, we may see the appearance of a great nation.
- Confucius
The best way to get to knowing any bunch of people is to go and listen to their music.
- Woody Guthrie
For me, music is this magic acoustic element that makes perfectly rational people who have come to realize . . . that they are truly alone in the world somehow feel for fleeting moments that maybe they're not alone after all.
- Billy Joel
I have always loved music; anyone who has skill in this are gains a good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster must have skill in music. Neither should we ordain young men as preachers unless they have been well exercised in music.
- Martin Luther
Teaching music is not my main purpose. I want to make good citizens. If a child hears fine music from the day of his birth, and learns to play it himself, he develops sensitivity, discipline and endurance. He gets a beautiful heart.
- Shinichi Suzuki
Which of the two powers, Love or Music, can elevate man to the sublimest heights? It is a great problem, and yet it seems to me that this is the answer: "Love can give no idea of music, but music can give an idea of Love." Why separate them? They are the two things of the soul.
- Hector Berlioz
Music is a spiritual doorway. . . . Its power comes from the fact that it plugs directly into the soul, unlike a lot of visual art or textual information that has to go through the more filtering processes of the brain.
- Peter Gabriel
When the real music comes to me--"the music of the spheres, the music that surpasseth understanding"--that has nothing to do with me, 'cause I'm just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me, and to transcribe it like a medium. . . . Those moments are what I live for.
- John Lennon
What is wonderful about music is that is helps man to concentrate or meditate independently of thought; and therefore music seems to be the bridge over the gulf between form and the formless. If there is anything intelligent, effective, and at the same time formless, it is music.
- Inayat Khan
Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
- Leonard Bernstein
Has any one ever observed that music emancipates the spirit? gives wings to thought? and that the more one becomes a musician the more one is also a philosopher?
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents.
- Ludwig van Beethoven
Most people don't have any idea what improvisation is . . . It means the magical lifting of one's spirits to a state of trance . . . It means experiencing oneself as another kind of living organism, much in the way of a plant, a tree--the growth, you see, that's what it is . . . It's not to do with "energy." It has to do with religious forces.
- Cecil Taylor
The funny thing about enlightenment is that it's like you're searching for something--say your hat--and you're tearing the house apart and suddenly you look in a mirror and you see it sitting on top of your head. Music is where I've experienced that. I'm in the flow, I'm in the zone, there's a definite shift in my consciousness, without desire, without my ego, without me thinking, oh wow, I'm playing great. Just experiencing it as a flowing, living moment.
- Vernon Reid
Music has no other object than to brush aside the veil of everyday life, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.
- Henri Bergson
We hide ourselves in our music to reveal ourselves.
- Jim Morrison
Music is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and impels us for a moment to gaze into that!
- Thomas Carlyle
Where speech fails, then music begins. It is the natural medium for the expression too strong and deep to be expressed in words.
- Charles W. Landon
Music is a language, but a language of the intangible, a kind of soul-language.
- Edward MacDowell
Music is not an escape from reality; it is an adventure into the reality of the world of the spirit.
- John Blacking
Music sobs for you. It laments, it rejoices, it explodes with vigor and life.
- Anaïs Nin
Dreams emerge from the great mystery mind.
They fill the head and heart
With images too rich to imagine.
These images,
Sounds
Rhythms,
Reside in a place that is outside of our control.
They are not what we think we are,
Nor what we want to be.
They are what we really are.
- Mickey Hart
For is not music a language?
And of what is it the language?
Is it not the language of the dream world,
the world beyond thought?
- Robertson Davis
The power of music is so great that in legends of all nations its invention is ascribed to the gods.
- Karl Marx
To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music played in the background of the mind.
- William James
Music soothes us, stirs us up;
It puts noble feelings in us;
It melts us to tears, we know not how:
It is a language by itself,
just as perfect, in its way,
as speech, as words:
just as divine, just as blessed . . .
Music has been called the speech of angels;
I will go further, and call it
the speech of God himself.
- Charles Kingsley
Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.
- Igor Stravinsky
Every nation, every human being that came across earth had a song and sang in some way to their God.
- Thomas A. Dorsey
Among the various things that are suitable for man's recreation and pleasure, music is the first and leads us to the belief that it is a gift of God set apart for this purpose.
- John Calvin
If you cannot concentrate when you pray, search for melodies and choose a tune you like. Your heart will then feel what you say, for it is the song that makes your heart respond.
- Sefer Chasidim
Without music, life would be a mistake. . . . I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It was twenty-five years ago that, on a full moon night in October, high on the foothills of the Himalayas, there first broke upon my ears the holiest sound I have ever hear. The solo chords of the Gyuto monks have impounded Tibet's mystery into sound--a sound so awesome, so ethereal, that it verges on a vocal miracle.
- Huston Smith
Music has many sides. It can seduce or frighten you. It can rattle your bones. It can let you see God.
- Mickey Hart
Music is the harmonious voice of creation, an echo of the invisible world.
- Giuseppe Mazzini
Music is . . .
a labyrinth
with no beginning
and no end,
full of new paths to discover,
where mystery remains eternal.
- Pierre Boulez
-here are a couple slightly more ignorant views on music:
The effect of rock 'n' roll on young people is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness, impair nervous stability, and destroy the sanctity of marriage.
- Rev. Albert Carter
Jam sessions, jitterbugs and cannibalistic rhythmic orgies are wooing our youth along the primrose path to hell!
- Rev. J. L. Beckman
and perhaps the worst one yet:
Music is no different than opium. Music affects the human mind in a way that makes people think of nothing but music and sensual matters . . . Music is a treason to the country, a treason to our youth, and we should cut out all this music and replace it with something instructive.
- Ayatollah Khomeini
to leave on a lighter note . . .
Driving down to Fiddler's Green to hear a tune or two
I thought I saw John Lennon there, looking kind of blue
I sat down beside him, said: "I thought you bought the store"
He said: "I heard that rumor, what can I do you for?"
"Have you written anything I might have never heard?"
He picked up his guitar and strummed a minor third
All I can recall of what he sang, for what it's worth:
"Long as songs of mine are sung I'm with you on this earth."
- Robert Hunter, from "Down the Road"