But it seems to me that most of the human beings whose lives have stirred us and whom we admire are people who dedicated themselves not to the elementary pleasures, but to something noble, something fine, something that reaches beyond. Some encounter with necessity is the ground of taking one’s life seriously. It’s the ground of being sensitive to all of the really beautiful things in the world. It’s the ground of being open to the call of something higher in which we have a chance to participate, whether it be perpetuation of our young, whether it be the future of our country, whether it be the arts or philosophy or music. And it’s the ground, really, of transforming what is otherwise a mere necessity into an occasion of something really splendidly human.
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.
On his “On the Transmigration of Souls”, a monumental and shattering work commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series:
My desire in writing this piece is to achieve in musical terms the same sort of feeling one gets upon entering one of those old, majestic cathedrals in France or Italy,” he writes. “When you walk into the Chartres Cathedral, for example, you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot. And even though you might be with a group of people, or the cathedral itself filled with other churchgoers or tourists, you feel very much alone with your thoughts and you find them focused in a most extraordinary and spiritual way.
My desire in writing this piece is to achieve in musical terms the same sort of feeling one gets upon entering one of those old, majestic cathedrals in France or Italy,” he writes. “When you walk into the Chartres Cathedral, for example, you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot. And even though you might be with a group of people, or the cathedral itself filled with other churchgoers or tourists, you feel very much alone with your thoughts and you find them focused in a most extraordinary and spiritual way.
Bach gave us God’s Word. Mozart gave us God’s laughter. Beethoven gave us God’s fire. God gave us Music that we might pray without words.
We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
Mozart tells us what it’s like to be human, Beethoven tells us what it’s like to be Beethoven and Bach tells us what it’s like to be the universe.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
It isn’t just that the sample rate is too low, it’s the phase angler that drives me crazy. You record a vocal track on a good 24-track machine and what it spits out afterward, the wave forms match exactly. There’s a little bit of distortion which usually is considered a benefit, but the actual wave form is true. You can take a before or after, you make an analog onto your computer and then play it back, the wave form is completely different. The reason is the high frequency and the low frequency are no longer in correct timing with each other. It actually causes a shift. It’s very significant. For my purposes, where I double-track a lot of things, I double-track vocals, lead guitar and all the rhythm instruments. As I’m playing I lay down the original track, and as I lay down the double, I am listening to the way to the two tracks play against each other in the phase cancellation. That’s what really creates the magic with double-tracking. When it’s going the way I like it, I keep going. When it’s not I stop and go back and do it again. You can’t do that in digital because the basic digital signal plays you back a signal that has been phase-shifted. The live guitar or vocal combined with the recorded one sounds a lot different — the live track and the played-back track are not the same. Very few people know that. Anybody can do that experiment by recording on both a good old analog machine and on their computer at the same time and then playing the computer track back to the tape. You can’t get it to match up. With a tape machine, it’ll either reinforce and be twice as loud or you can put it out of phase and it’ll disappear.
In den finsteren Zeiten,
wird da auch gesungen werden?
Da wird auch gesungen werden.
Von den finsteren Zeiten.
[In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.]
wird da auch gesungen werden?
Da wird auch gesungen werden.
Von den finsteren Zeiten.
[In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.]
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer to that would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be ‘No.’
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.
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Bach is MATH, dude. Bach is RESTRAINED. Bach never meant for you to get all Israeli and passionate and bombastic on his ass.
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music.
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music. They should be taught to love it instead.
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.
What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
Book: High Fidelity
Music is the expression of harmony in sound.
Love is the expression of harmony in life.
Love is the expression of harmony in life.
A ‘program’ which could produce brilliant music would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair.
Book: “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”