Quotes About History And Music

#1. I was never particularly academic, so it was no great surprise when I failed my 11-plus and consequently went to Wibsey Secondary Modern. I did all right in English, history and music, which were the subjects that most interested me.

Kiki Dee

#2. Personally, I love the cookie monster grunts. I like how they alienate listeners. We sound the way we sound. We're individuals. We don't all like the same music. Everybody contributes their own influences, style, and history.

David Pajo

#3. The reason I moved to Nashville was because I was reading biographies of a lot of my country music heroes, and I thought it would be better to actually go where the history was, as opposed to just reading about it.

Lindi Ortega

#4. I just want my music to measure up to. Part of it's just thinking about my place in history and how this music is going to be perceived, if it's listened to 30, 40 years from now.

John Legend

#5. The talent, including the talent for history - and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever - it shouldn't be allowed to lie dormant. It should be brought alive.

David McCullough

#6. What happens in the music business is that if you step out of your little spot to do something else, the sand falls right into where you stood and you're gone, you're history.

Nancy Sinatra

#7. As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.

Charlie Pierce

#8. We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things - maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.

Chris Stapleton

#9. We can teach about hip-hop history, we can teach about legends, hip-hop theory. It's been around so long that text books can be written about it. This is a perfect time to capitalize on and get kids excited about [music] education.

Kanye West

#10. In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

Moby

#11. Every single year since they invented sound recording it gets better and better. We've always improved it. With MP3, which just sounds awful, it's the first time in the history of recorded music that it sounds worse. It's really - and it's everywhere, it's ubiquitous.

Linda Ronstadt

#12. If it has to be put in a box, it's a country record. But it's hard to do that, because it is inspired and influenced by the history of music in two different people's backgrounds. I think the focal point for many is the harmonies, and I think that is what is special and unique about it.

Jessica Harp

#13. Music wasn't history class; I didn't need to memorize a thousand dates and names.

Leila Sales

#14. When you look back on music history, it falls into these neat periods, but of course, the period you yourself are living through seems totally scattered and chaotic.

Eric Whitacre

#15. Historical fiction isn't history in the conventional sense and shouldn't be judged as such. The best historical novels are loyal to history, but it is a history absorbed and set to music

Daniel Aaron

#16. Music and philanthropy have a long, benevolent relationship with one another. Record bins are rife with charity singles, and concert history is filled with benefit shows for every imaginable cause. Musicians like to give back.

Shawn Amos

#17. Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.

David Byrne

#18. To the large extent that music can organize our perceptions of our own bodies and emotions, it can tell us things about history that are not accessible through any other medium.

Susan McClary

#19. Music is there for us to explore. To intentionally limit yourself to one, two, or three genres is limitation at its worst. Music is huge; it's a gigantic history lesson, and if you are true music fan or a musician, you should explore it. It's all right there in front of us.

Phil Anselmo

#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. If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.

Moby

#22. Sound is the most absorbent medium of all, soaking up histories and philosophical systems and physical surroundings and encoding them in something so slight as a single vocal quaver or icy harpsichord interjection.

Geoffrey O'Brien

#23. I am inspired by music, travel, great architecture, and good, healthy food. I look for opportunities to learn about history, art, and cooking. When I learn, I grow.

Tim Matheson

#24. I can write for weeks or months sometimes and edit it down to a song. I feel like it's a piece of music that will hopefully stand the test of time and hopefully capture a moment in history if I'm doing it correctly and honestly.

Macklemore

#25. But ignorance of divine revelation affects all of thought and life, from one's view toward history and philosophy, to one's interpretation of music and literature, to one's understanding of mathematics and physics.

Vincent Cheung

#26. There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated.

Pete Seeger

#27. Another way of putting this is that black Baptists were outsiders to the dominant white/European way of doing church. Instead, they forged a history of their own, and even their own distinct form of sacred music.

Thomas S. Kidd

#28. From the beginning of church history, music, writing, literature, and the greatest works of art all came from the church. To change the culture and make it a force for good, you have to be in it and be a part of it.

Patricia Heaton

#29. I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

Steve Lacy

#30. Rock & roll seemed to just come to us, on the radio and in the record stores. It became our music ... But then we uncovered another, deeper level, the history behind rock and R&B, the music behind our music. All roads led to the source, which was the blues.

Martin Scorsese

#31. I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

Thurston Moore

#32. Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I'm nobody's authority.

John Darnielle

#33. I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

Dizzy Gillespie

#34. I always wanted to try to be a teacher even before I was in the music business. I liked history, and good teachers made an impact on me.

Billy Joel

#35. I have to tell you that J.S. Bach was easily the greatest musical innovator in the history of the world. He was so advanced for his time. There's a spiritual depth to his music. You can listen to it and it's like meditation.

Brian Wilson

#36. Maybe we've been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It's something that's open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here.

John Shelton Reed

#37. As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

Debbie Allen

#38. I was able to endure and play a special part in music history. And I always managed to keep working, even if I wasn't a big solo artist.

Merry Clayton

#39. I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

Salma Hayek

#40. New Orleans has a unique history as a great melting pot of all kinds of cultures, and that manifests itself now through the food, the music, and the kinds of people who live there.

Scott Bakula

#41. My mother wasn't rich, and I never seen my father. I was a street performer. I've been shot. And now I'm known around the world, and I've touched a lot of people with my music. That's one of the great testimonies that's gonna go down in history.

R. Kelly

#42. Scotty Moore plays one of the first really amazing riffs in rock history on Heartbreak Hotel with Elvis Presley ... it was dangerous, it scared everybodys parents, which was part of the attraction then - as it still is now ... it totally blindsided me and made me want to get a guitar and do that ...

Roger McGuinn

#43. I'm gonna go down in history as being one of the best music men and businessmen in entertainment ... The people that I'm going to be greater than are Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Clive Davis.

Puff Daddy

#44. Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again.

Cat Stevens

#45. Words have their genealogy, their history, their economy, their literature, their art and music, as too they have their weddings and divorces, their successes and defeats, their fevers, their undiagnosable ailments, their sudden deaths. They also have their moral and social distinctions.

Virgilia Peterson

#46. The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

Michelle Obama

#47. The history of popular music is littered with great partnerships. Rodgers had his Hammerstein, Lennon had his McCartney, and Lloyd Webber had ... his photocopier ...

Humphrey Lyttelton

#48. In the history of comics and movies and music too, it's always when things are at their bottomed-out, either creatively or financially, there's more chance-taking going on.

Brian Michael Bendis

#49. I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music.

Bill Bryson

#50. If I have one success in my relationship history, it's with the people who listen to my music. I think that they'll be there with me forever, and I'll be there with them forever. And I'm totally satisfied with that.

Fiona Apple

#51. In New York, I'm around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.

Steve Earle

#52. The Fiesta Tour McDonald's exhibit is a one-of-a-kind compilation of items and great moments in Latin music history. Every item has a unique story, including the outfit which I wore during the 2008 Premios Juventud awards.

Thalia

#53. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.

Leslie Marmon Silko

#54. I'm sort of obsessed with Harlem. Just its history. My father did the music for a play called 'The Huey P. Newton Story,' and they did a lot of work in Harlem. So as a little girl, I spent a lot of time in Harlem Library.

Tessa Thompson

#55. I did some stage when I was a kid, around 16 or so. I was living in Melbourne and had a band. I was quite young. We weren't very good. Then I found a band in Perth. We played around for three years. We're in the 'History of Rock'N'Roll,' a book about Perth music.

Paul Eenhoorn

#56. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking.

Heston Blumenthal

#57. Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.

Michael Eric Dyson

#58. The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.

George Bernard Shaw

#59. We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Patti Smith

#60. Music, art, writing - it gives us a sense of who we are, a sense of our history, a sense of our future and it should provide some kind of comfort. It's not just entertainment for entertainment's sake, it's an investment.

Sheryl Crow

#61. People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Brian Eno

#62. As far as the creative side of making great, great albums and really trying to go down in history? I don't see that happening lately, you know what I mean? You have a lot of guys is talented, but at the same time, timeless music is more important to me.

Raekwon

#63. History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.

Stephen King

#64. Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.

T Bone Burnett

#65. Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.

Martin Walser

#66. If anybody had a sense of history, it wasn't me, I'll tell you that. I, I was just enjoying life and, and making a living and, and, you know, listening to all this good music. No, there was never in my mind any kind of sense of history, nothing.

Cosimo Matassa

#67. You will be most readily cured of vanity or presumption by studying the history of music, and by hearing the master pieces which have been produced at different periods.

Robert Schumann

#68. Being Irish and a citizen of the world, has made me truly appreciate Irish culture, music and history. Whether you're first, second generation Irish or even with no connection to Ireland, you should visit in 2013 for a unique experience.

Liam Neeson

#69. And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.

Tony Randall

#70. I think one of the ways that these young singers got started is that they would end up in clubs. And a lot of them were mafia owned. And so there was almost an unspoken kind of mafia sponsorship, which is just a very interesting part of that area's music history.

John Lloyd Young

#71. Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

Jackson Browne

#72. I have always been obsessed with America, the geography, the history, and, of course, the music. I've been lucky enough to have travelled through the country a lot, and, in a kind of anorak way, I've noted which states I've visited and which ones I've been to most often and all that sort of detail.

Tim Rice

#73. People sing each other's songs and they cultivate standards. That's the reason why we have folk music and folk stories. History is told through song.

Brandi Carlile

#74. I don't know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We're very rigid. It's funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can't we take little parts of history and mix it together?

Mark Bradford

#75. Michael Jackson doesn't really belong on this planet. He's the most important figure in the history of music. He'll be remembered far longer than George Bush will. 200 years from now, people will be talking about Michael Jackson, and no one's going to mention George Bush.

Brett Ratner

#76. Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#77. For centuries, everything was taught through music. History was taught through music; language and mathematics were taught through music.

T Bone Burnett

#78. Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock

#79. I'm always going to get more of a charge playing Chicago than I will Duluth or some place like that. Just because of the history and the people there are way more knowledgeable than a lot of other cities. It's an amazing music scene with some great bands and great musicians.

Matt Cameron

#80. You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

Jerry Garcia

#81. When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

Valentina Knurova

#82. If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#83. You can't fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that's got nothing to do with it. It's how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.

Etta James

#84. I'm not ashamed, or embarrassed. I'm happy that I grew up listening to gospel music and came from where I came from. I feel like I have a history and a story. That's what I am and that's what I'll always be from. I was never running away from it.

Katy Perry

#85. I'm extremely happy about music altogether, and the history that I've made. How I changed the world, music-wise, music over the internet and stuff like that.

Lil B

#86. The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

Toru Takemitsu

#87. I think it's really cool, but Jimmy Eat World and Gin Blossoms did it better than anyone. People don't realize just how awesome the Arizona history is, especially for alternative music. Growing up, that's all I ever wanted to be was those two bands.

Nate Ruess

#88. My Dublin wasn't the Dublin of sing-songs, traditional music, sense of history and place and community.

Colin Farrell

#89. We live in a post-authentic world, and today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you're bringing when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, and your personal history. At the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters.

Bruce Springsteen

#90. I was listening to a lot of Norwegian black metal and death metal. There's a great history to Norwegian black metal. That music is very dark and violent, but it's also beautiful.

Brie Larson

#91. If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music ... and of aviation.

Tom Stoppard

#92. I can speak French, understand Gaelic and know my history. That's the training music has given me.

Eddi Reader

#93. Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

Dave Grohl

#94. We are mosaics - pieces of light, love, history, stars
glued together with magic and music and words.

Anita Krishan

#95. I'm completely absorbed by Peter Guralnick's definitive, two-part biography of Elvis Presley: 'Last Train To Memphis' and 'Careless Love.' Meticulously researched, this is a compelling mix of history, myth-busting, and, of course, some timeless music.

Mark Billingham

#96. It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.

Tim Cahill

#97. Diogo and the other OPA irregulars had breached a high-value research station, faced down one of the most powerful and evil corporations in a history of power and evil. And now they were making music from the screams of the dying.

James S.A. Corey

#98. I believe that all of these studies, activities and outings are memorable in their own way, and that they do have subtle effects on our lives. On a deep level, what we see as art, hear as music and learn as history touches us and we are moved.

Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

#99. I'm not giving up my history and what I've done in my music because I love it and I'm very proud of it. I just want to open it up for more people.

LL Cool J

#100. I know there's some kind of history to mountain music-like it came from Ireland or England or Scotland and we kept up the tradition.

Loretta Lynn