Top 94 Music Performance Quotes
#1. Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower.
Ryan Kavanaugh
#2. Music therapy, to me, is music performance without the ego. It's not about entertainment as much as its about empathizing. If you can use music to slip past the pain and gather insight into the workings of someone else's mind, you can begin to fix a problem.
Jodi Picoult
#3. Comedy is the only form of entertainment where the audience doesn't know what to expect. In an evening, you might get ten comics doing ten different things. That's not what happens when you go to hear music. There isn't a classical performance followed by a hoedown followed by rap.
Jon Stewart
#4. I love live performance and have huge admiration for people who can really do it. It's the same with music: I'll play a record and think that I'm not really into country or ragga. But, if it's live and the musicians are good, I'll listen to pretty much anything.
Helen McCrory
#5. Even if the songs are at times painful - 'cause some of the songs are not all roses and balloons; some of them dig into deep things that I've been going through - there's a joy that I think people feel from my music and, hopefully, from my performance because I am so in love with doing what I do.
Rachel Platten
#6. When I was your age, I would go to plays all the time, just sit in the darkness and try to take it all in inside me. Contain everything in some corner of my heart so that when I had my shot, it could all come pouring out - all the lights and moments and colour.
Brenna Ehrlich
#8. One of the things I love about music is live performance.
Yo-Yo Ma
#9. They call them performance artists, but they shouldn't be making an album. They should just be dancers. I don't know, I'm a musical snob. I feel like if you're going to record music and you're going to be a singer, you have to be able to sing.
Warryn Campbell
#10. As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.
Gavin Bryars
#11. I know, for me, you know, my generation - I never would have known anything about Robert Preston's performance in 'The Music Man' if there hadn't been a film where he played the part. I just heard how great he was on Broadway way before my time.
John Lloyd Young
#12. I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn't exist without the performance-art element.
Lady Gaga
#13. A studio is like a meditation room where music is created. And a live performance is the place where the creation of the studio is taken ahead. I love both.
Shreya Ghoshal
#14. I've always been a huge fan of theatre and performance. The idea of just the human voice and just this night. Live music is the same. They're doing it for you right now. It's an amazing thing. And if you perform a story properly, it can be a transporting, too.
T.C. Boyle
#15. On the Rolling Stones - You will walk out of the Amphitheatre after watching the Stones perform and suddenly the Chicago stockyards smell clean and good by comparison.
Tom Fitzpatrick
#16. I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.
Milton Babbitt
#17. Film brings together framing and light and color and performance and music and all of that. To me, everything I've done in my life has been preparing me for filmmaking.
Peter Landesman
#18. A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.
Franz Grillparzer
#19. For me, the idea of curating can be expanded. Curating science, curating art, music and theater and performance and not only bring those things into art but bring art into those areas.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#20. They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.
Haruki Murakami
#21. Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'
Ani DiFranco
#22. You can fix things with digital technology and there's a temptation to fix everything or make it perfect and what you're losing there is the human performance that may not be perfect but there may be magic in it. You can make it perfect but music doesn't sound good perfect for some reason.
Joe Walsh
#23. For some people, fame kills it and becomes more important than the music or the performance. But for me fame is like rocket fuel. The more my fans like what I'm doing, the more I want to give back to them. And my passion is so strong I can't sleep - I haven'tslept for three days.
Lady Gaga
#24. I love doing fiction. I love doing performance films and I love doing documentaries that don't have music. I love to shoot and I love to shoot things I'm enthusiastic about.
Jonathan Demme
#25. Even people that know Johnny Cash's music really well and know that he was married don't really know that much about June Carter. So finding out about her really helped to inform my performance and to bring her to the front in a way that she has never been before.
Reese Witherspoon
#26. Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.
Billy Joel
#27. Music helps define the character and is an extension of the character somehow, so that you are able to use both the songs themselves and the way that you sing them to tell something about the character and his story, as well as develop a performance style.
Alessandro Nivola
#28. A fantastic actor in a scene that's just closed off will be good. But when working with a director who knows little tricks - correct music, slowly pushing in - that stunning performance will somehow become even better. I've always seen it as a symbiotic relationship.
Matthew Gray Gubler
#29. The art of DJing is sharing music with one another ... The technology's definitely taking it into a new direction to where it's really becoming performance-based.
Kaskade
#30. 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
#31. I think after music is performance because it is also an immaterial form of art, and then there's everything else.
Igor Levit
#32. My general take on American music since 1969 is that it's just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight - audience, performance, and palace guard.
Iggy Pop
#33. 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
#34. Before the whole [music] business was calibrated around the selling of records. I never could have imagined that live performance would become kind of a vortex of the business. It's such a seismic shift really.
Arthur Fogel
#35. Kind are her answers, But her performance keeps no day; Breaks time, as dancers. From their own Music when they stray.
Thomas Campion
#36. Music films are great, but they can never compete with a live performance. Live music is what it is. It's the whole point. You experience it in the moment.
Jonathan Demme
#37. 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
#38. The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. - Alvaro Pascual-Leone
Oliver Sacks
#39. I love fashion. I like dressing how I feel, and my music shows how I feel - they go hand in hand. My performance style is pretty much the same as my everyday style.
Banks
#40. Miss Petrowska,an excellent pianist, held the audience transfixed with Chou Wen-chung's work. Miss Petrowska was coolness itself in getting the hardware into the piano and out again ... in Messiaen, a feeling for the music's reverent sobriety combined to produce an absorbing performance.
Donal Henahan
#41. The perfection of performance has escalated to the extent that the music itself is threatened with relegation.
Igor Stravinsky
#42. Did you see Britney Spears at the Video Music Awards? I don't want to say that that performance was a disaster, but after the show, I saw Rudy Giuliani having his picture taken standing on her.
Bill Maher
#43. Music and visual performance have to influence each other. Designers and musicians have to be the nexus of all things pop culture, so I think about designers when I'm making music.
Lady Gaga
#44. I would enjoy venturing into music, as I do write songs and compose music! And, of course, dance, rhythm and performance are in my blood, so eventually I see myself doing something in that area, surely!
Jiah Khan
#45. He gave us music that reached into the ear like a lover's tongue and changed the color of our feelings. He presented movement so exquisite and fluid it coaxed our souls out of our bodies to dance with him, weightless in the perfume of divinity.
Katie Waitman
#46. The performance of performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.
Igor Stravinsky
#47. If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that's such a rare gift. It's underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.
Iggy Pop
#48. Strive for excellence, rather than perfection, and the audience may so enjoy your beautiful, expressive tone that they will readily forgive a few stray notes.
Ruth Bonetti
#49. I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.
Jerry Harrison
#50. After conducting a concert in a small town, I once received the following note from a farmer who had attended the performance: "Dear Sir, I wish to inform you that the man who played the long thing you pull in and out only did so during the brief periods you were looking at him."
Arturo Toscanini
#51. The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
#52. There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.
Leo Ornstein
#53. When I was on the ice, in the lights, with the music and the motion, there was a certain kind of flirtation that gave great energy and expressiveness to my performance.
Peggy Fleming
#54. I had been creating music on tape that was to be listened to as a recording, rather than through performance.
Paul Lansky
#55. The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.
T Bone Burnett
#56. Nothing has more words and performance than rap music.
Chuck D
#57. At a festival, a lot of people came to see other artists, so you have to put on a signature set and performance: 'This is what I do, this is why I'm here.' At solo gigs, I'm a DJ - I'll play two-and-a-half hours, and not just my own music, also my favorite songs by other artists.
Afrojack
#58. Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't.
Josiah Bartlett
#59. I was doing experimental noise-based music and I learned a number of things about performance. I was playing small shows - sometimes without a PA - where people couldn't really hear me so I relied a lot on physicality and a sense of discomfort and risk.
Erika M. Anderson
#60. My belief is that the music is always stronger than the performer: there is always something new, something we learn, whether at a performance or during a rehearsal.
Helene Grimaud
#61. Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
Anne Lamott
#62. Three languages - the video, the music and the live performance - are awesome to bring together.
Planningtorock
#63. To me, dance is so ethereal and elusive, so much of an illusion. After a performance, that's it. With vocals and music, you have good recordings.
Jamie Wyeth
#65. The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom in a single moment.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#66. Making a record? You've got to have the song, then you create a record. I think it's the same with a live performance. If the material is strong, you're already 90% there. I always tell young people it's all about the music, the songs. Work on the songs, work on the songs, work on the songs.
Tom Petty
#67. I don't get a rush from anything. I did music as hard as I could. Acting for me at least, is a far more restrained performance than music. It requires a lot of skill and discipline. I'm not any good at it but I enjoy trying to be good at it.
Henry Rollins
#68. I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?
Nicolas Cage
#69. Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#70. Just as music comes alive in the performance of it, the same is true of mathematics. The symbols on the page have no more to do with mathematics than the notes on a page of music. They simply represent the experience.
Keith Devlin
#71. Music herself should be silent when Nicholas speaks. (on why he had stopped playing during a performance with Tsar Nicholas I in attendance)
Franz Liszt
#72. If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
Simon Rattle
#73. When recordings replaced concerts as the dominant mode of hearing music, our conception of the nature of performance and of music itself was altered.
Charles Rosen
#74. Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
Frank Zappa
#75. A sloppy performance in a photograph is as distressing as a sloppy performance in music.
Fred Picker
#76. As the drummer, I know that drums fully support the band. Their rhythm keeps things within the pulse and contributes to the overall energy of each performance. I am a very balanced person and I realize that through my personal level of balance, I also outwardly balance Stjepan and Luka.
Dusan Kranjc
#77. My first performance was in second grade with my friend Rodney Fisher, and we worked up versions of 'Long Tall Texan' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.' It gave me a little early confidence that I could actually do this music thing.
Lyle Lovett
#78. There are those who dance the notes, and those who dance the music.
Eva Ibbotson
#79. If you do performance and music, it's not performance as music.
Marina Abramovic
#80. I've lived in New York all my life, and we went to the Mormon Pageant each year in upstate New York. It still is a wonderful production. I remember going and seeing the performance and listening to the music. My father had Mormon Tabernacle Choir music, and we would listen to it and sing with it.
Renee Fleming
#81. As I sit down and start to work, I often panic. I stare at the empty piece of music paper. How can I say that my piece will be ready for performance next January when I do not have a recipe for making it happen?
Lukas Foss
#82. I think one of the reasons I haven't been doing music is because I think that some of my performance, like, needs are being taken care of in other mediums.
Carrie Brownstein
#83. Music is very similar to comedy: It's all about texture, timing, context, vocabulary, performance. When someone's onstage doing a solo, essentially it's the same thing as what a comedian does. They're in the moment. They're listening.
Reggie Watts
#84. Throughout the performance Levin felt like a deaf person watching a dance. He was quite perplexed when the music stopped and felt very tired as a result of strained attention quite unrewarded.
Leo Tolstoy
#85. I always wanted to be a comedian and actor, [ ... ] I basically stumbled into the music medium, though. I'm OK, but that's about it. I like to think I'm good enough not to negatively affect the performance.
Bo Burnham
#86. A lot of festivals can be a jumble of electronic music and rock and roll, and everything's all mixed up - some things are more performance art or light shows or dance parties, and then you'll have a singer-songwriter stuck in the middle to make the changeovers easier.
Jenny O.
#87. I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'
Lady Gaga
#88. Performance and music are inexorably tied together. And hell, I'll watch Brittany's Toxic music video all day. But there's a difference between that and listening to Leo Kottke play guitar. One is entertainment. The other is Music.
Patrick Rothfuss
#89. Music is about communication, and the chemistry between an audience and the orchestra is absolutely essential; the performance does not exist in a bubble.
Charles Hazlewood
#90. I think there's such a thing, as a performance gene. If it's in your DNA it needs to come out. For me it originally came out through music, then segued into acting and came out through there. I always needed to get up and perform.
Cillian Murphy
#91. I've had the healthy and sobering experience of constantly working with music that is invariably better than any performance of it can be.
Andre Previn
#92. I come from the performance world, but the idea of a worship song is different. It's useful music.
John Tesh
#94. It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music.
Lukas Foss
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