Top 59 Quotes About Music Theory
#1. We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
Marvin Minsky
#2. I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.
Rohinton Mistry
#3. Any talk of 'craft' makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it's like the first time. There's no craft in that.
Bill Callahan
#4. Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world.
Beck
#5. I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.
Wes Borland
#6. I always wanted to be a musician, 100 percent, my whole life. I went to school, I did music theory, I did voice training and piano lessons, and while I was a decent musician, it didn't seem like enough for me. I felt like I wanted to make more than just music.
Adria Petty
#7. Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory.
Neil Diamond
#8. Do everything you can to learn your craft. Score student films for free, attend conferences, learn music theory - do anything (and everything) you can.
John Keltonic
#9. There are tools that help sharpen freestyle skills like having a diverse vernacular, some sense of music theory, being outspoken, phrasing, spacing, cross word puzzles, thesauruses, the ability to expand on an issue and embellish that with more descriptive terminology.
Myka 9
#10. When I was very young, I played in a punk-rock band, but I also studied music theory and classical music.
Moby
#11. I took music theory in high school and dropped out halfway through the semester because it was ruining music for me.
Blake Judd
#12. Most of my music theory knowledge is based on piano. But I write on guitar a lot, too. I'm not a great guitar player by any means. I'm not a great instrumentalist. I play piano on stage. I don't play guitar on stage, but I use it to write quite a lot.
Zooey Deschanel
#13. I don't know anything about music theory at all. Zero. But I don't really need to.
Amos Lee
#14. I began seriously concentrating on music study after I entered senior high school. I went to a class in the arts section at the YMCA and learned music theory and composition. Today, there are many classes like this available, but this was not so much the case in those days.
Isao Tomita
#15. If it hadn't worked out professionally, I would be teaching music theory and composition in a small college somewhere and playing drums in a jazz trio at the Holiday Inn on weekends, and I'd be happy there, too.
J. D. Souther
#16. The quality of instruction is very high at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music. It's not about being a rock star. It's about the fundamentals of music, theory and technique on a particular instrument, and playing in an ensemble or private setting.
Flea
#17. I learned to play by ear before I learned music theory. For me, that makes sense. After all, children learn to speak before they read and write. The more you understand of music - how harmony and time signatures work, and what chords and inversions are - the more you'll enjoy it.
Jools Holland
#18. I'm maybe too rude with myself but the fact is that I don't know music theory so I can't tell myself "it's ok now I make good stuff," I need to improve more and more.
Marilou
#19. I studied voice when I was at school, and I was in the chamber choir, and I studied music theory as well, so I guess a lot of it came from being taught at school.
Lily Allen
#20. It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.
Quincy Jones
#21. To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music.
John R. Pierce
#22. I feel like once the song is done, you put it out there and if people want to do bizarre remixes, if people want to make strange videos, great. You know, like chaos theory applied to the music business.
Moby
#23. If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time ...
Charles Kettering
#24. So I immediately joined Sutton College of Music in Grove Road, Sutton to thoroughly learn theory of music. Over and over again, I would copy all the major and minor scales until I was blue in the face. It wasn't easy because it was so boring but I knew it was absolutely essential to have this
John Fox
#25. As discussed earlier, when it comes to music, most of us tend to have confidence in our taste even though we may totally lack knowledge regarding historical development or compositional theory. I frequently hear, "I don't know anything about art" but hardly ever, "I don't know anything about music".
Michael Findlay
#26. My own personal theory is that all popular music, in whatever form it is, to me, it all comes from Africa. Whether it's filtered through America or whatever - African-American. But I still think there's something in that roots music that's very, very African, and I think that's what unites people.
Paul Weller
#27. String theory is based on the simple idea that all the four forces of the universe: gravity, the electromagnetic force and the two nuclear forces, can be viewed, as music.
Michio Kaku
#28. When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.
Harrison Birtwistle
#29. [If] it were possible to watch composing in the same way that one can watch painting, if composers could have _ateliers_ as did painters, then it would be clear how superfluous the music theorist is and how he is just as harmful as the art academies.
Arnold Schoenberg
#30. You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
Quincy Jones
#31. Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.
Keith Jarrett
#32. There are different people who got me into music, but what I liked about Beethoven is that even when I didn't understand it or it was too long, there's still something about it that drove me to it. Then it got me excited about actually learning music, like a theory of it.
Albert Hammond Jr.
#34. Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much.
Derek Bailey
#35. Theory is a six-letter dirty word to most musicians, but hey, musicians love dirty words, right? And just like all the other dirty words, theory is easy to learn and fun to use!
Ray Harmony
#36. I'm hopeless at playing scales. Try and be instinctive first and analytic afterwords, although it's good to study the theory of music.
Brian May
#37. I realized that, all along, my theory was right: Make music that you want to hear, and instead of having fans that one day might criticize or abandon you, your fans aren't even fans. They're people with tastes similar to yours. They're friends you haven't met yet.
Natalia Kills
#38. Does this mean that religious consumption will increase online? That could be. We do not know yet, but to expect religion to disappear because of online technology is like expecting people to stop listening to music because Napster, Spotify and Wimp are offering us all the music we want online
Torkel Brekke
#39. Architects should be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#40. Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.
Harrison Birtwistle
#41. Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage.
Alanis Morissette
#42. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#43. I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.
Jon Secada
#44. I was pretty lucky to get into Berklee at all. I never really had any theory or music-reading capabilities; I was completely by ear.
Madi Diaz
#45. In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God's creation ... as music.
Roy H. Williams
#47. I write music that sounds complex but isn't. I frankly never think in terms of theory.
Eric Whitacre
#48. In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the 'Mind of God' is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace.
Michio Kaku
#49. All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei.
Arnold Sommerfeld
#50. 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
#51. The theory that music has a depraving effect on morals has now been abandoned to the old women of both sexes.
George Bernard Shaw
#52. Music is an attitude. It's a sensation to the average person, to the human being. And keep it simple, stupid. That's always been my theory.
Dick Dale
#53. Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#54. I've come up with the theory that the music is within. We don't bring it in; it's already there. We have to figure out how to get it out.
Howard Roberts
#55. I think there are some things in music that work and don't work. That's learned from counterpoint and rhythm and theory, and they don't work if you don't want them to work.
Jeanine Tesori
#56. I have a theory - if the music is good and you have good musicians, the name doesn't matter that much. There are a lot of examples of that. The name is just a calling card.
Joey Tempest
#57. Music is part of Number Theory. Nowadays when a number-theorist applies for a grant, he says that it is good for security, but in those days, way before America, he would say that it's good for music. I will not comment whether we have progressed ...
Hendrik Lenstra
#58. See my father knew a lot about music, he played the piano and he would do theory and stuff like that, but I didn't learn anything from him, but I played that for him and he liked it a lot.
John Fahey
#59. Comedy is like music; it builds on itself. Once someone comes up with a theory or a different way of doing things, people start to mimic it on some level. That's why you go back to the guys you loved in the 80s ... and it just seems tired now, because it was all foundation.
Doug Stanhope
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