Quotes About Instrumental Music

#1. Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.

Terry Teachout

#2. I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious.

Glenn Branca

#3. When I was a teenager, I got into four track recorders, drum machines, and synthesizers, and I started producing instrumental music.

Duncan Sheik

#4. Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized and there's just no outlet, there's no venue for it, in terms of media.

David Sanborn

#5. When you're talking about your own music every day, listening to bands, going to festivals, you can kind of lose sight of your initial connection with music. Instrumental music - especially jazz - helps me refocus.

Jenny Lewis

#6. I did record a bunch of stuff, but the thing that usually stops me from doing that is that I'm a terrible singer. I made a bunch of instrumental music, and it feels really good, but just as a singer, I'm not good.

Flea

#7. After all my years of doing instrumental music I still like just a simple instrumental song with a nice catchy melody and an opportunity to play a solo over a harmonic structure.

Stanley Clarke

#8. I usually listen to surf music, not much instrumental music, and when I was younger I listened to jazz.

John Hughes

#9. I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.

Carlos Santana

#10. I probably listen to more instrumental music than music with lyrics, but at the same time I do love both.

Flume

#11. You look back, and it was important to bring back instrumental music, and it was great to be a part of that wave of instrumental rock music. And clearly it was something I was destined to do.

Stuart Hamm

#12. Haida preferred to listen to instrumental music, chamber music, and vocal recordings. Music where the orchestral component was loud and prominent wasn't to his liking.

Haruki Murakami

#13. Instrumental music can spread the international language.

Herb Alpert

#14. I gave up language for a while, and I started painting.And then I only listened to Miles Davis and other instrumental music to see how it felt to be without words.

Rosanne Cash

#15. The essence of higher instrumental music lays herein that one is able to express in tones that what one is unable to say in words.

Richard Wagner

#16. Wonderful is the power of instrumental music, absolute music without words, that may convey impressions, deep and lasting, no words could give.

Aubertine Woodward Moore

#17. With instrumental music, it is traditionally hard to get exposure.

Yanni

#18. The magic that you find in surf music, I think, is really timeless. You know, when I was very young, I was in a surf band. Surf music is an instrumental music that still means a lot to me, not in an nostalgic way, but as something that really gets to the heart of the guitar itself.

John Zorn

#19. Instrumental music was only tolerated, on account of the times and of the people. But in gospel times, we must not have recourse to these, unless we wish to destroy the evangelical perfection, and to obscure the meridian light, which we enjoy in Christ our Lord.

John Calvin

#20. When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.

Charles Darwin

#21. The character of instrumental music ... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.

Franz Liszt

#22. Singing instrumental music is most important because, while you play an instrument, you are singing through the instrument ... actually, you are singing inside.

Ali Akbar Khan

#23. Lord, save the Church from desiring to have pews, choirs, organs, or instrumental music, and a congregational ministry, like other heathen Churches around them!

Peter Cartwright

#24. Of all the early breakthrough rock and roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers.

Cub Koda

#25. With Bruford, the album was One Of A Kind. All-instrumental, it possessed the kind of focused vision that allowed for no ifs or buts. With the unnerving confidence of youth, it had This Is What We Do And This Is How We Do It stamped all over it.

Bill Bruford

#26. I absolutely think the Seattle grunge sound was instrumental to my music education.

David Cook

#27. The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper and communicating it to the public.

Giacomo Puccini

#28. 'The Beatles' did whatever they wanted. They were a collection of influences adapted to songs they wanted to write. George Harrison was instrumental in bringing in Indian music. Paul McCartney was a huge Little Richard fan. John Lennon was into minimalist aggressive rock.

Chris Cornell

#29. When I was younger, I was able to write with music playing in the background, but these days, I can't. I find it distracting. Even when the music is just instrumental or has lyrics in a language I don't understand, the clash between the voices in my head and the song can be very disorienting.

Daniel Alarcon

#30. The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.

George Crumb

#31. I spent a lot of time in Tower Records. I'm a huge music nerd, and Tower was instrumental to me when I was growing up.

Colin Hanks

#32. It's hard to put my music in a specific genre, but if you had to, "instrumental cyber metal" would be an accurate one.

Paul Wardingham

#33. I just started as a part of the public school music program. I took lessons at the school every Friday and was a part of the school band. I was just a normal kid taking instrumental lessons at school, nothing special.

Kenny G

#34. 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

#35. While most of the music I write is instrumental, I love to use the human voice as another instrument.

Yanni

#36. Most of the music I've listened to or grew up listening to - a lot of it at least - is instrumental stuff.

Flume

#37. I just prefer instrumental. I don't need to hear what other people are singing. And if I need music as a backdrop to work or to think, I need to have that part of the brain clear - I don't need people feeding their fantasies into my vision.

Lydia Lunch

#38. I'm inspired by the music, always have been, always will be, it's only what a track or instrumental interpretation from a producer can do that will excite my pen into making magic for someone else to enjoy..Only the music inspires me..

Truth Hurts

#39. I was trying to actively get away from music, I guess. But I recorded a whole bunch of instrumental piano songs.

Jens Lekman

#40. When Lonnie Mack came out with the guitar instrumental "Memphis" I thought, Oh God, finally somebody we guitar players can relate to !

Richard Betts