Quotes About Traditional Music

#1. Irish folk is probably the biggest influence musically that I've ever had. My mother's Irish. And when I was very young, both my brothers were very into traditional music, English and Irish. They were always playing music, so I was always brought up with it.

Kate Bush

#2. I love traditional music. But in any culture around the world, there is the historic and cultural music and everything that's been passed down and passed down, and hopefully you take that, and then you take it, you know, the next distance, and then somebody else takes it the next distance.

Robbie Robertson

#3. I'd like to be remembered as a keeper of the flame who kept traditional music alive, because I've been doing that twice as long as I was in the Byrds.

Roger McGuinn

#4. First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality.

Pierre Schaeffer

#5. Can you imagine that Cuba and Europe's youth, who had forgotten about traditional music, who only thought of rock music, are now looking back towards their grandparents? That is a phenomenon.

Compay Segundo

#6. When Merle and I started out we called our music 'traditional plus,' meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play.

Doc Watson

#7. Once you're in a particular country, and you're surrounded by musicians who are so adept at traditional music, you suddenly realize how much there is to explore and digest and learn and experience.

Evelyn Glennie

#8. I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures.

George Crumb

#9. Apart from Scottish traditional music, I wasn't really influenced by any kind of music. I just basically followed my own instincts.

Evelyn Glennie

#10. Mine is not a traditional music, but it comes from a tradition.

Tom Chapin

#11. I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

P.J. Harvey

#12. Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material ... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

Brian Eno

#13. The music that I play and that I like is traditional music, maybe it's because of my age.

Compay Segundo

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

Colin Farrell

#15. My feet always danced to Irish traditional music, but I was very glad to get out of the North of Ireland in the mid-Seventies when it was really closed and tight and relentlessly unforgiving.

Ciaran Hinds

#16. Here it is: our collaboration with Project Spark . Instead of a traditional music video for GUILTY ALL THE SAME (feat. Rakim), we are giving you this as a starting line for you guys to create and share. This is the first interactive, remixable game. We look forward to seeing what you make with it.

Joe

#17. By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Brian Eno

#18. I have been interested in Irish traditional music for the past few years.

Nobuo Uematsu

#19. I found out about college radio and this whole noise genre blew me away. When I saw that guys could just get up there and have no traditional music ability and be in a band, it was really appealing to me.

Girl Talk

#20. Just like there's a hole in the ozone layer, there's a hole in the musical ecological layer [wrt lack of successful "conscious" music] ... 'Traditional' music was brand new at one time ... When you hear R&B today, do you believe it?

Vernon Reid

#21. I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

Robert Glasper

#22. I always have music. I love it to be very upbeat. When you're having drinks, I like something like Cesaria Evora. During dinner, I like the much more traditional - old Frank Sinatra and things like that.

Ina Garten

#23. Part of it is, I think, just to let people know you've got a record out there and that you're still alive requires more work than it used to, because the traditional radio, bug chains of record stores, all of that, that doesn't exist anymore.

Steve Earle

#24. My childhood was filled with music and singing and a passion for traditional Yemenite songs, picked up from my mother.

Ofra Haza

#25. As the voices beneath the music are talking, you find that the music is just as important as what they're saying. The traditional thing is to lower the music so you can hear the dialogue. We just couldn't do that for that song.

Stanley Nelson Jr.

#26. They're great instrumentalists, singers and songwriters and they have this unique way of blending contemporary with traditional. The result is this beautiful mix of timeless music.

Cindy Cashdollar

#27. Since the beginning, the people of the college and I have agreed that the music of MerleFest is 'traditional plus.'

Doc Watson

#28. It's not music you can evaluate in traditional ways. If you look around at a concert, you might see what look like bored people, or maybe they're drifting, but they're just having another kind of experience, an inner thing.

Paul Horn

#29. We sat still, our breathing loud and rhythmic, its music melancholy, a traditional song of sorrow.

Margot McCuaig

#30. It's heartening to return to live music, heartening for people like me in a band. It's a very traditional thing to return to. It re-validates the original form that we fell in love with.

Mick Jagger

#31. On the aesthetic level, decolonized music presents itself as a direct antagonist to the traditional values promoted by the culture industry.

Bocafloja

#32. I enjoy listening to classical music and heavy metal. I play basketball and try to go diving at least once a year. I don't really have hobbies in the traditional sense ... I engage in too many activities already through the actions of my characters.

Alan Dean Foster

#33. With The Key, it was, I had gone through a divorce and losing my father, and just kinda really reminiscing about how much I loved the traditional side of country music, so I made a record that was really traditional from start to finish.

Vince Gill

#34. I have been influenced by the greatest artists in jazz, pop, reggae, traditional, ballards, pop, and all types of music, taking the best from each to represent my own personality. Whitney Houston, George Michaels, Sade, Phil Collins, and many others have influenced me.

Laura Pausini

#35. I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n' roll.

John C. Reilly

#36. They've pursued their own agendas, and they've done what they've wanted to do and not pursued traditional careers in the music industry. They've followed their own instincts, and they are in many ways maverick performers.

Neil Tennant

#37. All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.

Ava DuVernay

#38. There are so many wonderful, wonderful musicians in the world, I cannot possibly make a distinction between the fact that they might play classical music, or bluegrass, or Irish traditional, or Indian music.

Daniel Hope

#39. One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.

Terry Pratchett

#40. Now we have so many different genres of music, it's amazing to me. Even in the gospel music arena, you've got hip-hop, you got contemporary, urban contemporary, you got traditional, you got neo-soul gospel, you've got all of these different things.

Marvin Sapp

#41. In oddball places, the electric guitar has been taken as an almost alien object - this weird, six-stringed instrument that fell down to earth and was then played loud but with traditional grace and intelligence

Ry Cooder

#42. Country fans need to support country music by buying albums and concert tickets for traditional artists or the music will just fade away. And that would be really sad.

George Jones

#43. To us, it's vey natural. Initially, it sounded kind of strange to people, because it is different to put traditional Irish music in a pop and rock mode. But they get used to it
it is our sound.

Andrea Corr

#44. The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who - in their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses" - cannot hear the music of the spheres.

Albert Einstein

#45. The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

Fredric Jameson

#46. I loved Roy Acuff with all my heart, and I never dreamed I'd be able to meet him or see him onstage, or especially become good friends with him. For all this to happen, it's hard to explain what a dream this is when you love something as much as I love traditional country music.

George Jones

#47. Traditional songwriting, to us, is where the experimental nature comes in. We're all involved with so much outside activity with really hardcore, experimental music-making.

Thurston Moore

#48. I grew up with the Blind Boys' music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

Ben Harper

#49. Inaudible prayers, particularly of the Canon, which at first don't seem to have anything to do with music, end up being a very important part of the aesthetic of the traditional structure of the Mass.

Richard Morris

#50. 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

#51. I don't think my music's as traditional as people make it out.

George Strait

#52. I love that there's this tradition of being able to discuss the heaviest topics and the gnarliest stuff that goes down in people's lives in traditional Southern American music.

Gillian Welch

#53. I'm sure if we had made an album that was more traditional would have been released immediately. When we actually play this music on stage and people become familiar with it, it will become more popular.

Mick Taylor

#54. Everybody knows in the business how I feel about country music. I'm an old traditionalist. Then they just call me an old man and stuck in my old ways, but with all the fans I've got out there, I can't be all that wrong. I do love traditional country music. I love the good stuff.

George Jones

#55. Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Rachel Kushner

#56. 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

#57. You know, traditional country music is something that's going to be around forever.

George Strait

#58. In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

Pierre Schaeffer

#59. I like for it to be mountain music or old-time country music or traditional bluegrass. Either one will fit me. It's traditional, basically.

Ralph Stanley

#60. Of course when you are a kid you listen to what your parents had around. A lot of gospel, jazz. Now when I started to listen to music on my own it was around the time of the birth of rock and roll. Shortly thereafter I started to get into more blues and more traditional rootsy American music.

Jorma Kaukonen

#61. I am a product of Indian cinema; I've grown up watching Indian films ever since I can remember. And song and dance is part of our lives; it's part of our culture; we wake up to songs, we sleep to lullabies, you know, we celebrate every religious and traditional function with music.

Karan Johar

#62. I have such a deep love for traditional country music.

Connie Smith

#63. Well, more than me saying to the rest of the country music industry there is not enough traditional country music - that is not necessarily the statement in truth. I think more so that I, me, missed it more than anything else.

Vince Gill

#64. [T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living.

Ted Gioia

#65. A whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with traditional Negro music.

Archie Shepp

#66. I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.

Claude Debussy

#67. A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds
music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts
can lift a community.

Martin O'Malley

#68. I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.

Abigail Washburn

#69. It is not that I don't like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.

Vince Gill

#70. I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience.

Pierre Boulez

#71. Once again, Kirk Franklin takes the church beyond the traditional, transitioning his life's experiences into life lessons. Clearly there is more to this man than great music. You will feel the beat of his heart and faith.

T.D. Jakes

#72. I've never really been a traditional country kind of guy. I wanted my music to sound more like the end of the '90s and to have the kind of great music, pop or whatever, that radio will embrace.

Bryan White

#73. Because I refuse to perform my music in a traditional sense of instrumentation, I don't have an amazing live stage spectacle to provide, and I don't want to go there. I don't see how the music would stay true to the spirit of the work.

Tim Hecker

#74. There are people out there who are into traditional country music and for those people you have artists like Brad Paisley and Josh Turner and Alan Jackson. Then you have artists with a progressive style of country music, like myself and Eric Church and Luke Bryan and Miranda Lambert.

Jason Aldean

#75. Country Music has always changed for the times, if you listen to the recordings from the 50's to 60's to 70's, to now, the message is still there, basic down to earth songs about real people, it the music that's been updated. Some of it I like, but still prefer the traditional sound.

Mark Chesnutt