and here

is a succinct summary of the Rebecca Black phenomenon: http://www.slate.com/id/2289341/

Quotes about music

Quotations about Music Related Quotes      Dancing      Parties      Singing      Art      Silence A painter paints pictures on canvas.  But musicians paint their pictures on silence.  ~Leopold Stokowski Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.  ~Berthold Auerbach All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!  ~Thomas Carlyle If the King loves music, it is well with the land.  ~Mencius Without music life would be a mistake.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons.  You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.  ~Gustav Mahler Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?  ~Michael Torke And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents like the Arabs And as silently steal away. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done He who sings scares away his woes.  ~Cervantes Music was my refuge.  I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.  ~Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.  ~Benjamin Disraeli Music is what feelings sound like.  ~Author Unknown There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears: Their earth is but an echo of the spheres. ~Lord Byron Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues.  The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg:  I have it in my pocket.  ~Henri Rabaud Music is the poetry of the air.  ~Richter If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music.  It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.  Sydney Smith There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is.  ~William P. Merrill If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.  ~Henry David Thoreau Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.  ~Ludwig van Beethoven I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours.  But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places.  Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.  ~H.A. Overstreet My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.  ~Edward Elgar Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them! ~Oliver Wendell Holmes Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom.  If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.  ~Charlie Parker Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.  ~William F. Buckley, Jr. Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.  ~Henry Ward Beecher Play the music, not the instrument.  ~Author Unknown Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.  ~Ludwig van Beethoven Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.  ~Robert Fripp [An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger.  ~John Chesson Music's the medicine of the mind.  ~John A. Logan You are the music while the music lasts.  ~T.S. Eliot Music is the universal language of mankind.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer Music rots when it gets too far from the dance.  Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.  ~Ezra Pound He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.  ~Robert Browning You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.  ~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet.  ~Oliver Herford What we provide is an atmosphere... of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way.  Under its influence I've seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell.  ~Meyer Davis, about his orchestra Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.  ~Victor Hugo ...where music dwells Lingering - and wandering on as loth to die... ~William Wordsworth, "Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge" Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel.  ~Buffy Sainte-Marie Music is an outburst of the soul.  ~Frederick Delius Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.  ~Oscar Wilde In music the passions enjoy themselves.  ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886 Music is what life sounds like.  ~Eric Olson If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term:  organization of sound.  ~John Cage Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.  ~Arnold Bennett Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.  ~Alphonse de Lamartine There is in souls a sympathy with sounds: And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave; Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies. ~William Cowper When words leave off, music begins.  ~Heinrich Heine Truly to sing, that is a different breath.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke Music is the shorthand of emotion.  ~Leo Tolstoy There is no truer truth obtainable By Man than comes of music. ~Robert Browning Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living.  But serious music was never meant to be soporific.  ~Aaron Copland What passion cannot music raise and quell!  ~John Dryden The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.  ~Leonard Bernstein Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.  ~Paul Simon Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory - ~Percy Bysshe Shelley A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.  ~Benny Green The notes I handle no better than many pianists.  But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides!  ~Artur Schnabel The pause is as important as the note.  ~Truman Fisher The city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built forever. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven.  ~Lawrence Duncan Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.  ~Confucius Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country.  ~Edmund G. Brown Music can noble hints impart, Engender fury, kindle love, With unsuspected eloquence can move, And manage all the man with secret art. ~Joseph Addison My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front.  If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle.  ~Liberace Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.  ~Ronald Reagan The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention:  the need for rhythm in life… the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril. ~Richard Baker Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.  ~Leigh Hunt Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Comments of Abe Martin and His Neighbors, 1923 Country music is three chords and the truth.  ~Harlan Howard An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like.  From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts.  ~Kit Coleman, Kit Coleman: Queen of Hearts I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar? ~Percy Bysshe Shelley Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.  ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?  ~Charles Ives The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously.  Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.  ~Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.  ~Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays Music is love in search of a word.  ~Sidney Lanier It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible.  ~Victor de LaPrade Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life.  ~Jean Paul Richter Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker.  ~William Green If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.  ~Simon Rattle Bach opens a vista to the universe.  After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.  ~Helmut Walcha I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.  ~Lily Tomlin The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief.  ~S.A. Sachs Music is well said to be the speech of angels.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays, "The Opera" Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.  ~Robert Benchley No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.  ~W.H. Auden, Time, 29 December 1961

interesting thoughts on rhythm

Jennifer Rogers kindly drrew my attention to this very intriguing statement, from Keith Richards' Life:

"There's something primordal in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross into another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there's not one. Listen to "Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It's just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn't have to be pronounced. This is where they got it wrong with "this rock" and "that rock". It's got nothing to do with the rock. It's to do with the roll"

hearing loss

The article is mostly focused on classical music and musicians, but contains timely and sober warnings for all:
http://www.bsherman.net/hearingloss.htm

Frith Notes - Why do Songs have Words?

Frith Words and Music
A. In the usual, simplest case, a song is a conjunction of words and music
B.The experience of the song, especially in performance, is primarily a matter of the rhythmic interaction of the words and music
According to Simon Frith, popular song has been studied as if it consisted primarily of words, with the music somewhere in the indeterminate background
Scholars of content analysis treat the song’s lyric as a message, and the song as a bearer of that content; a love song is “about” love, so all you have to do to discuss it is look at the way it—i.e., the lyric—talks about love
HF Mooney 1954: the themes of pop lyrics reflect the concerns, ideas, and emotions of the audience
No particular mention of what, if anything, the music of the songs “reflects”; and no mention of what the hell the music is doing there at all, for that matter
A song’s popularity equates to agreement with its message in reality or in fantasy (i.e. nostalgic longing for the good old days represented in country lyrics)
[kit 35:] e.g. Dave Harker’s insistence that the marriage mentioned in “Winter Wonderland” “articulates key fantasies.. about the pattern of sexual relations felt to be most appropriate for a particular social order”
once more, no hint of what, if anything, the music is doing in the piece
Frith [pg 36]: “Songs are, in this account, a form of propaganda.”
For some (academic) critics, the cure for overly romantic, idealistically phoney emotions is lyrical realism, the direct expression [in words] of the genuine emotions and social realities of the singer (and audience) (“keepin’ it real” is an expression of a related idea); the true aim of (popular) music is “authenticity,” some sort of direct correspondence between the reality of the experience and (reality of) the song
If a singer sings about drug dealing, infidelity, or stamp collecting, the song is “better” if the singer is in fact a drug dealer, philanderer, or stamp collector
Once more:  the entire perspective has buggerall to do with the music
Some entire styles or genres were/are considered “more authentic”: blues, especially rural blues; hip-hop, especially gangsta rap; country, especially pre-Shania
As a rule: the more demonstrably miserable the personal life of the singer, the better the song
[pg 40] “[assessments of].. lyrical realism.. [and banality] assume that songs differ in their effects.. [because] these can be read off good and bad words”
in other words: a good or bad song can be judged as written on the page—without music, without performance, without a singer
[pg 40] some studies suggested that listeners were unaware of the subject matter of pop songs; “changes in lyrical content cannot be explained by reference to consumer ‘moods’.”
[pg 41] Frith: “In songs, words are the sign of a voice. A song is always a performance and song words are always spoken out, heard in someone’s accent.”
In other words, ironically, the notion that the experience of a song is equivalent to the message of its lyric also overlooks the reality of those words, which is that they are sung, in a particular way, by a particular singer.
The words themselves are not the same when sung by a different singer!
[Frith:] to understand popular song lyrics requires studying the “performing conventions” that exist in particular music genres
different genres of music allow or cause their audiences to imagine different kinds of [social/emotional] community
[pg42] “The songwriter’s art.. is.. to cherish words ‘not for their sense alone but for their poise and balance,’ and this is a matter of rhythm too — the rhythm of speech.”
“Pop [love] songs do not ‘reflect’ emotions.. but give people the [romantic] terms in which to articulate and so experience their emotions.”

two very interesting articles

1. about music and sound generally:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/10/10/treasure.sound/index.html?hpt=C1
2. about sound compression (somewhat technical but informative and thoughtful):
http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/digital_data_compression_musics_procrustean_bed/

music performance and the music business

The scary thing about this cartoon is how unrealistic it isn't: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11GEx-PyNAc