Quotes About Vaughan Williams

#1. Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

Aaron Copland

#2. Things go wrong all the time; you can't be precious about it.

Tori Amos

#3. Even if somebody tells us something, the hit, the light goes on inside of us, not out there. We learn and understand everything within ourselves.

Krishna Das

#4. Rock star do not jump!" The launch was cutting sharply, its skipper calling out a phrase that bore no relationship to the English language as Amy knew it. "Rock star in a hurry!" Nellie replied, one foot on the boat's gunwale.

Peter Lerangis

#5. Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#6. The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#7. I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#8. A killing was exactly what he didn't want to make because to make a killing you had to kill, and he lacked the killer instinct.

Margaret Atwood

#9. Do the thing you love to do. Hank Williams died at the ripe old age of twentynine. Stevie Ray Vaughan at thirty-five. Jesus at thirtythree. Don't think you're special and the Lord's gonna bless you with time.

Jill S. Alexander

#10. The competition is very stiff. Brian Williams has proved himself as a credible news anchor (at NBC), and Bob Schieffer has done the same (at CBS). But as Peter and Tom (Brokaw) and Dan have always said about the competition, it makes us all better.

Bill Vaughan

#11. Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#12. Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#13. No. No, first comes boyhood. You get to play with soldiers and spacemen, cowboys and ninjas, pirates and robots. But before you know it, all that comes to an end. And then, Remo Williams, is when the adventure begins.

Brian K. Vaughan

#14. No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#15. I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#16. It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.

James A. Baldwin

#17. The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#18. Words of love cast from thy lips reach another heart at lightning speed.

Molly Friedenfeld

#19. The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#20. But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#21. Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#22. I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant.

Vaughan Williams

#23. The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is "wrong" and arises from insular ignorance.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#24. A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#25. To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough ...

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#26. There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#27. Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#28. It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#29. War is legitimized state-sponsored terrorism in a grand scale.

Newton Lee

#30. The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#31. The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#32. If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.

George C. Marshall

#33. Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#34. I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

Ralph Vaughan Williams