Top 100 Quotes About The History Of Music
#1. 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
#2. Because of the fashion, the young people don't have any access to the history of music, unless people like me revive it. There are very few people to revive it, because you can't earn any money doing it.
Bill Wyman
#3. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
Tom Stoppard
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. It's the team that matters. Where would The Beatles be without Ringo. If John got Yoko to play drums the history of music would be completely different.
David
#7. 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
#8. I don't know anything about the history of music.
Sia Furler
#9. The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
Milan Kundera
#10. 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
#11. I don't ever balk at being considered a Motown person, because Motown is the greatest musical event that ever happened in the history of music.
Smokey Robinson
#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. You need the past as a guideline. The history of music is a good basis, but to escape that stuff, that tortuous rulebook, you have to learn it first. It's kind of like religion - once you've written the Bible, that's it, move on.
John Lydon
#14. There are pieces that in the history of music that also make me cry. I'm not ashamed to cry.
Charlemagne Palestine
#15. The Beatles are the most credible band in the history of music.
Ryan Tedder
#16. If you look at the history of music, you have classical composers, church music, pop music, etc. Music that's existed for centuries. I think there are some songs that are close to immortal. They will last longer than we will in this lifetime.
Mike Love
#17. The history of music is nothing more than the history of art-music or classical music, the music that was commissioned by aristocrats.
Frank Fairfield
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. In the history of pop music, a lot of great records cost an enormous amount of money. There used to be a time where people that had means to experiment would do it, you know?
Thomas Bangalter
#26. A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning. - Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company, April 1997
Tom Standage
#27. My YouTube videos have literally millions of views ... Yet I'm still airbrushed out of the BBC Stalinist revision of history; the chart shows have been instructed not to play my music!
Jonathan King
#28. 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
#29. Hip-hop's always reached out to kids. If you look at the last 10 big albums it might seem ironic. But when I look at the history of this music it's always had a lot of positivity.
LL Cool J
#30. Believe me when I say that some of the most amazing music in history was made on equipment that's not as good as what you own right now.
Jol Dantzig
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.
Dave Grohl
#34. Though I know consciousness kind of boxes you in, it still encompasses the artists that I knew were conscious throughout history of music - they're the ones that you look at as the legends.
Will Ferrell
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.
Pat Metheny
#39. I love the history of popular music. I love to know what people are listening to, even if I don't like it.
Tim Rice
#40. There are a lot of chapters to the banjo's history. Part of it are the roots in Africa, where it's a more primitive instrument. Then it comes to the United States where it morphs into the slave music that they created here, which was very African in origin.
Bela Fleck
#41. In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.
Mike Figgis
#42. 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
#43. Man I mean, the great thing about playing clubs in Harlem is people have an appreciation not just for the music but for the history of the music.
Christian Scott
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
Brian Eno
#48. My Dublin wasn't the Dublin of sing-songs, traditional music, sense of history and place and community.
Colin Farrell
#49. In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction
A.J.P. Taylor
#50. You have a history of art-music that you equate with music. That's what I love about that term art-music. It separates itself from music-music, the music people have always made.
Frank Fairfield
#51. I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.
John Darnielle
#52. Most of the best music in American history was made by people with no options.
Isaac Brock
#53. I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.
Karen DeCrow
#54. Bob Geldof is a nauseating character. Band Aid was the most self-righteous platform ever in the history of popular music.
Steven Morrissey
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.
Jon Stewart
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The idea of a musical comedy was something we had had in mind for many years, but the project 'Igudesman & Joo: A Little Nightmare Music' has a history that goes back five years. I can say that this is the most successful project that we have ever done.
Aleksey Igudesman
#68. If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries.
George Crumb
#69. 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
#70. Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.
Greil Marcus
#71. The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.
James Surowiecki
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. One does not realize the historical sensation as a re-experiencing, but as an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather of the world by means of music.
Johan Huizinga
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. The rise of salsa was such an important time in musical history, not just in Latin music but music in general, because these guys created a new sound.
Jennifer Lopez
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. In Jazz, like in America, the group works together toward a common cause with lots of room left for each individual to shine.
Richie Gerber
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]
David McCullough
#93. 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
#94. 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
#96. 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
#97. Safe sex, safe music, safe clothing, safe hair spray, safe ozone layer. Too late! Everything that's been achieved in the history of mankind has been achieved by not being safe.
Lemmy Kilmister
#98. To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.
David McCullough
#99. 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
#100. Records can ruin you. That's why it's important to be as intimately familiar as possible with the history of recorded music, I guess. In a way, it's an argument for record collecting.
Keith Fullerton Whitman
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