Music Listener Quotes

#1. As a music listener, I'm becoming more and more ADD - like, "Eh, I'm bored with this". So who knows how long I'll be playing music.

Chaz Bundick

#2. I get really affected by songs as a music listener - they mean so much and they feel so significant.

Dee Dee Ramone

#3. I am a really obsessive music listener, and I would look for clues.

Craig Finn

#4. I know that there are a lot of sort of silly things that one thinks as a music listener about bands. I am a fan of many bands.

James Mercer

#5. The more music you make, the better listener you become.

Graham English

#6. Only to the degree that a musician is healing himself or herself through music can a listener be healed.

W.A. Mathieu

#7. Surely the hold of great music on the listener is precisely this: that the listener is made whole; and at the same time part of an image of infinite grace and grandeur which is creation.

Marya Mannes

#8. Music must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or, in other words, must never cease to be music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

#9. I think music is a powerful medium because it co-inspires. It inspires the artist who then inspires the listener, and it's a back-and-forth process.

Serj Tankian

#10. I listen more to music when I'm on my computer. I'm into the latest YouTube thing. I'm a nanosecond kind of listener, but if I'm driving I would be listening to a Merle Haggard box set. It's a weird experience listening to 'Working Man Blues' by Merle Haggard and cruising around in a Porsche.

Jason McCoy

#11. Music - so different from painting - is the art which we enjoy most in company with others. A symphony, presented in a room with one other listener, would please him but little.

Robert Schumann

#12. I've been musically inclined since I picked up an instrument in the fourth grade. I just really appreciate music. I love to listen to it; I love to sing. I wouldn't consider myself, like, a natural singer. I just developed it over time, honestly, just listening. I'm a great listener to music.

Kyrie Irving

#13. My whole life is geared to play guitar. I play what I want when I want and I hope the listener gets as much pleasure listening to the music as I get playing it.

Jim Sullivan

#14. Bach is played altogether too fast. Music that presupposes a visual comprehension of lines of sound advancing side by side becomes chaos for the listener; high speed makes comprehension impossible. Yet

Albert Schweitzer

#15. I want my music to be accessible to every listener because I know that I really have something to say in terms of really, you know, removing thorns from people, thorns that really makes us unaware that we are bleeding with these thorns, like pain, grief, jealousy and so on.

Vusi Mahlasela

#16. Music speaks to people at a level that is much more universal and can kind of trigger things in the listener in ways that other forms of communication can't.

Tim McIlrath

#17. Intent is in the composer, interpretation is in the conductor, rendering is in the instrumentalist, perception is in the listener, sound is in the notes, and rhythm is in the intervals. Music is the harmonious relationship between them all. Relationship is beauty.

Dee Hock

#18. He had a feel for silence, for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for ...

Annie Proulx

#19. Music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions that listener has.

Lou Reed

#20. In the beginning, I was searching for myself in my music. My music was for me. I didn't have the mental room to be conscious of the listener; I wrote to save myself.

Ayumi Hamasaki

#21. Led Zeppelin was the rock band's rock band, but it was Plant who made it special. He had the knack of taking a seemingly inconsequential string of words, adding a searing shriek, and knocking the listener back on his heels. This was no less impressive on stage than in the restaurant.

Andre The BFG

#22. I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.

Yanni

#23. Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.

Charles Bukowski

#24. The composer must bear in mind that the radio listener does not hear music directly. He hears it only after the sound has passed through a microphone, amplifiers, transmission lines, radio transmitter, receiving set, and, finally, the loud speaker apparatus itself.

Raymond Scott

#25. In their plush melodies and plummy platitudes, many Rodgers-and-Hammerstein songs were secular hymns, which so insinuated themselves into the ear of the Eisenhower-era listener that they became the liturgical music for the American mid-century.

Richard Corliss

#26. I'm not sure it's a better music world of appreciation and performance. I think the listener is a different guy, and listening is something he does in passing, with other stuff going on. There's less care and understanding of the relationship between the song and the listener.

Al Jarreau

#27. I like using concrete imagery, but I don't feel that's what it's about. It's a combination of concrete and abstract to take the listener somewhere they know better than you. That's true for music, seeing a painting, watching a movie ... it's all some kind of an escape.

M. Ward

#28. The artist must forget the audience,
forget the critics, forget the technique, forget everything but love for the music.
Then, the music speaks through the performance,
and the performer and the listener will walk together
with the soul of the composer, and with
God.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#29. Music affected him as women's talking did, when there was no interceding in it. He was an instructor, not a listener.

John Updike

#30. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.

John Cage

#31. I have sometimes been told that my music is 'difficult' for the listener.

Roger Sessions

#32. If sound is music and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound. If the sound is effective, it should actually have a chemical - some sort of physiological - effect on the listener, so he doesn't have to hear that sound again.

Keith Jarrett

#33. I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

Benjamin Britten

#34. I'm a big vinyl listener, I'm a big audiophile. I have a really nice stereo set up at home with a hi-fi and really nice turntable and it's a big deal to me to listen to music in it's purest form like that.

Butch Walker

#35. I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener.

Sufjan Stevens

#36. When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.

Aaron Copland

#37. Alien Chutney is just what the name suggests it is. Its music that is so funny and quirky and weird that it feels entirely alien to the listener; yet, the content and the subject matter is so Indian and relatable, it's still chutney.

Vir Das

#38. A tapping foot isn't the best a listener can get from a song: A good song makes a listener dance. A great song makes him think.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#39. Most experiences are either sensual or intellectual. Chamber music, played by a small group so the listener can follow what each player is doing, is both.

Karen DeCrow

#40. Atmosphere is a silent music. It has its effect upon the listener, exciting or peaceful, whatever it may be.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#41. Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad.

John Coltrane

#42. Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

Rebecca West

#43. I want to be able to depict in music a glass of beer so accurately that every listener can tell whether it is a Pilsner or a Kulmbacher.

Richard Strauss

#44. A lot of times good, pristine recordings prevent the listener from getting emotionally involved in the music.

Moby

#45. You have to enjoy playing. The old-timers did, and that's one reason why their music is a lasting music. I feel that I play jazz to entertain the listener, and you just can't do that unless you yourself are entertained at the same time.

Barry Harris

#46. Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.

Marvin Minsky

#47. I'm a good listener, you know. My gran used to say that's why you've got two ears and one mouth. I just truly love what I do and treat it with a lot of respect and all these relationships in the music business that people talk about.

Johnny Reid

#48. I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

Leo Ornstein

#49. I can't imagine how people will react to my music. For me, it's a really fluid process from one record to the next, but it's really up to the listener.

Jenny Lewis

#50. When it comes to rock music, I'm not much of a player, but I do have entry-level chops. I'm more knowledgeable as a listener, and Revival gave me a way to write about rock and roll without being preachy or boring.

Stephen King

#51. Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician

Wynton Marsalis

#52. I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.

Paul Lansky

#53. The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.

George Steiner

#54. Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener.

Jimmy Buffett

#55. The musician and the listener.
If this is love between two strangers watching each other from afar, that rough, burning moment when you rush in and kiss is the show.

Tablo

#56. It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

Carson McCullers

#57. Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.

Karl Barth

#58. I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.

Arvo Part

#59. I have this ideal listener, as John Cage did. This listener doesn't bring expectations that my music will fit into some part of music history, or that it will do any particular thing. This listener is just open to listening.

Missy Mazzoli

#60. Our music draws the listener away, beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies to the root of the universe, while European music leads us to a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy.

Rabindranath Tagore

#61. I think music is a selfish masturbatory event - for the listener, the maker, the candlestick ... maker.

Joshua Homme

#62. I guess I would definitely feel a bit of a void in what people are getting from music these days. And I think that the problem lies not so much on the listener. People kind of listen to what is presented to them, whether it be on the radio or at a local venue.

Ben Lovett

#63. It's a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#64. It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

Beck

#65. It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.

Kelly Jones

#66. I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

Claudia Rankine

#67. To me, that's what music is: creating a mood, and taking the listener to the place that you're going.

Paul Rodgers

#68. Art leaves something to the listener; that's what separates art from craft.

Henry Threadgill

#69. If the music has a logic of its own - as I think my music has - an open-minded listener will apprehend and understand.

Paul Lansky

#70. It gives the listener a good workout, to listen to the music, the same as it does us to play it.

Jim Sullivan

#71. My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

Pat Metheny

#72. I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.

Edgard Varese

#73. If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez

#74. With people increasingly faced with turmoil, uncertainty and crisis,
I wanted to create music that uplifts the listener and offers a sense of hope to prevail.

Clifton Anderson

#75. As I understand life at different levels, I can use music to express what these levels feel like to me. Hopefully the listener can be transported to this understanding by listening to the music.

Yanni

#76. Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

Conor Oberst

#77. A brilliant mind was first a listener that observed the actions of the people that loved and hated them, then found a way to express their feelings, when real communication was lost.

Shannon L. Alder

#78. A conductor has to know how to translate music into a communicative force that makes the listener want to hear what he has to say.

Isaac Stern

#79. But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination.

Diana Krall

#80. I liked music that I didn't have to think about, and most country songs spelled it right out for the listener. The girl was mad because the guy cheated, the guy was mad his pickup got trashed, everyone was sad the dog died, and Taylor Swift had about as much luck with men as I did.

Jay Crownover

#81. I think in space or music or art or literature of any kind there has to be some kind of void where the viewer or the spectator or the listener or the reader can insert themselves into it, and there is a certain kind of architectural space which is totalitarian, which does not allow you to do that.

Jonathan Meades

#82. Elemental music is never just music. It's bound up with movement, dance and speech, and so it is a form of music in which one must participate, in which one is involved not as a listener but as a co-performer.

Carl Orff

#83. The idea of music is to liberate the listener and lead him to a frame where he feels he is elevated.

A.R. Rahman

#84. The collectability of music is something lost in the age of MP3s and album downloads. Holding an album in your hands and having the full-sized artwork reconnects the artist and the listener.

Mark Hoppus

#85. Songs are as sad as the listener.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#86. I love to leave the interpretation of my music up to the listener. It's fun to see what they'll say it is.

Erykah Badu