Quotes About Western Music

#1. I'm very interested in music and where these sounds of Western music come from.

Ben Katchor

#2. Both the nationalists and the communists disapproved of jazz and feared it. They thought it would weaken people's resolve to fight off the invasion. And most Americans know, China did ban all Western music for about 30 years, starting in 1949. This is where it started.

Nicole Mones

#3. Skiffle was blues featuring a washboard and acoustic instruments. It encompassed blues, with elements of folk, jazz, and, at times, American country-and-western music.

Van Morrison

#4. Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).

Michael Snow

#5. I've got great joy from rediscovering Western music. I love Schumann and Chopin, and those amazing symphonies of Bruckner.

John Tavener

#6. I think all groups who don't fit in clearly with Western music have to think, 'How can I expand my market? Where else can I perform?'

Kiran Ahluwalia

#7. I'm not crazy about country-western music. But the lyrics are good.

Alice Cooper

#8. Hildegard von Bingen conveys spiritual ecstasy, if we're talking of Western music. What bothers me about Western music is that it doesn't have an esoteric dimension in the way the music of the East has, whether it be Byzantine chant, the music of the Sufis, or Hindu music.

John Tavener

#9. People never heard bells in Western music sounding really cataclysmic. You hear that more in Russian music or in Asian, Indonesian traditions.

Charlemagne Palestine

#10. In Bombay, we have a fine concert hall. I think it is high time we built venues in Delhi and Calcutta, not only for western music, but also Indian music. It doesn't matter which party is in power; don't you think the capital of India should have a concert hall?

Zubin Mehta

#11. When the truth is that there would be no great Western music, and certainly no decent choral repertoire, without the Catholic faith.

Richard Morris

#12. I've been informed by both sides, jazz, western music, Asian music, African music, all sides, because I've been interested in the sound of the universe, and that sound is without limit.

Joseph Jarman

#13. Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

Terry Riley

#14. Sometimes I lie awake at night and think about that little red-haired girl ... I don't ever want to forget her face, but if I don't forget her face, I'll go crazy ... How can I remember the face I can't forget? Suddenly I'm writing country western music!

Charles M. Schulz

#15. Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable convention, to the need to express subjectivity. It stands against the harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands against the insensibility of the universe.

Milan Kundera

#16. [Europe has] this tradition of self revelation in popular music. We have it here - it's called Country Western Music ... I think that's where the deeper and more complex subjects are treated.

Leonard Cohen

#17. Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters.

David Byrne

#18. I'm a big fan of gospel music, and you cannot be a fan of rock and roll, you cannot be a fan of country western music, and you can't really be a fan of jazz without listening to a lot of music that's religious.

Penn Jillette

#19. As people's lifestyles have improved, they've become more and more sensitive toward animals. It's becoming a universal value, like Western classical music.

Wang Shi

#20. I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it's Indian or it's Western.

A.R. Rahman

#21. I took a lot of long summer road trips with my dad, and the mix of music we listened to on the road skipped around from classical to Western to new age to hyper-cinematic.

Alex Ebert

#22. We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music from life.

Ornette Coleman

#23. I decided that I wanted to explore all kinds of music with my cello, not just the Western classical tradition. I just wanted to try and expand my vocabulary and bring that different kind of music to my audience.

Maya Beiser

#24. The musical instuments may be western but my voice never wavers away from my own ragas. it is good to make experiments and I do a lot of them but my thoughts always round the centre and that centre is the tradition of my elders and it is classical music..

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

#25. My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.'

Ravi Shankar

#26. Even more so in nonindustrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life.

Daniel J. Levitin

#27. Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.

Rokia Traore

#28. I tend to lean more towards the Westerns of the 40s and 50s as opposed to the 60s and 70s. They get a little too drab for me when you get into the Spaghetti Western era. I love the John Ford movies. I love the music. I love the scope.

Seth MacFarlane

#29. Western cathedrals and abbeys ... through soaring Gothic architecture, [give] us at floor level a sense of belonging within (but unable at the moment to inhabit more than a little of) great spaces of light and beauty, into which, significantly, only our music can penetrate.

N. T. Wright

#30. For in Western culture, music itself is always in danger of being regarded as the feminine Other that circumvents reason and arouses desire.

Susan McClary

#31. I'm not a one-stop music shop with jazz improv in aisle 3 and country and western in aisle 4. I have a fairly focused and established kind of melody and approach, so people know what they're getting into when they go into business with me.

Charlie Clouser

#32. She now represents the Western United States, thus proving politics is even more accepting of the strange, unusual, and mostly useless than the music industry.

John Zakour

#33. You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.

Ornette Coleman

#34. Music is monophonic in the Eastern world, especially if we're talking about Indian music, Persian music. What we have in classical and Western world is harmony. So I think it's a great idea to be able to bring the best of two together and create something new.

Hafez Nazeri

#35. Trance had become a dirty word. Thanks to Ian Van Dahl, Lasgo, Flip 'N' Fill and DJ Sammy, a generation of kids has grown up thinking trance is the shittiest music since country and western.

Paul Van Dyk

#36. People are going to wake up to this great reservoir of music we've created in America - cakewalks, one-steps, boogie-woogie, country and western. I had a bit to do with one of those traditions.

Johnny Otis

#37. I think the only music I didn't listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day.

David Bowie

#38. Elvis Presley is the main founding father of rock music. He was an unheralded genius behind a new music that changed western civilization for all time.

Peter Noone

#39. I loved Western Swing and Hank Williams' music, and I now know that it's a 6th tuning that gives you all of those classic licks.

John Fogerty

#40. Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?

Pierre Schaeffer

#41. Of course, western is my native music,

Ken Curtis

#42. There's only two kinds of music I don't like ... Country and Western.

Bobby Heenan

#43. In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.

Ravi Shankar

#44. I think that Sufism fits all over the world. The concept is not anything that fits standard Western ideas - it's always related to culture, to music, to religion. It is a dominant religion in Senegal.

Youssou N'Dour

#45. I was interested in both Western and Indian classical music.

Satyajit Ray

#46. For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity - or even western creativity - but this assumption was seriously in error.

Anthony Braxton

#47. The origins of Indian classical music, not unlike their western counterparts, lie in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures of 2,000 years ago.

Tariq Ali

#48. I also like Western classical music and jazz.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

#49. I listen to a lot of really old western and country music. There's a lot of cool stuff in there ... all the heartbreak of the country darkness.

Theophilus London

#50. Country and western is the music of the devil. That's the real truth of the matter. My late Mother, bless her, loved country and western. God, I couldn't handle it.

Rick Wakeman

#51. Careful listening to current country and western and rock music with the help of an interpreter for coded phrases shows that young people are hearing a constant stream of messages about getting high, feeling good, going on trips, and using drugs of all kinds with all methods.

Virgil Miller Newton

#52. Reese sucked in a breath and played faster, hurling the anger through his fingers until it spun all his
fear, all his rage, into the gentle voice of music.

Willowy Whisper

#53. 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

#54. I'm just trying to unite the western crowd and the bluegrass crowd a little more ... I get to do that again on my new album, Tall Grass and Cool Water ... This is the first time I've had every song on an album be a Bluegrass and Cowboy Song at the same time.

Michael Martin Murphey

#55. I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.

Tim Crane

#56. I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

Danny Boyle