There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music. John Keats
Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician. Kurt Vonnegut
If one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen. Timothy Leary
I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me – like food or water. Ray Charles
I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to. Elvis Presley
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The water in music the oar forsakes. The air in music the wing forsakes. All things in move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars. John Muir, letter to Jeanne C Carr 1974 Yosemite
How exactly did this music made by dirt-poor African-Americans in the dusty fields of the south go on to inspire the likes of the Rolling Stones, Jim Hendrix and Eric Clapton and shape the face of modern rock? A Journey Through American Music, 2007
Robert Johnson’s Love in Vain: in his teens Johnson used to hang around older players like Son House. ibid.
B B King blazed a more sophisticated trail than other delta blues players. ibid.
Until recently B B played upwards of three hundred gigs a year. ibid.
Rock giants such as Eric Clapton, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd were all deeply influenced by B B King’s guitar style. ibid.
Ike Turner – he was a member of the band who recorded the ground-breaking track Rocket 88 ... The first true rock-n-roll track. ibid.
Ike Turner started out playing sessions on guitar and piano for the likes of B B King, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Rush and Buddy Guy. ibid.
Ike claims to remember sneaking a young Elvis Presley into a black club in Memphis and hiding him behind his piano. ibid.
In 1956 Ike met a young singer called Anna Mae Bullock. She soon became Tina Turner and they had their first hit together, A Fool for Love, in 1960. ibid.
Ike also played piano on the album Demon Days by the cartoon band Gorillaz. ibid.
Blind Lemon Jefferson – it carried on through T-Bone Walker ... and then Clarence Gatemouth Brown. ibid.
Gatemouth was a master of both the fiddle and the guitar and combined blues, country, jazz and Cajun influences. ibid.
Frank Zappa said Gatemouth was the guitarist he admired the most. ibid.
Mississippi natives Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Walters pioneered a beefy amplified sound which helped them cut through the noise of crowded city bars. ibid.
Clapton has said that Buddy Guy is the best guitarist alive. Others see him as the link between blues and rock. ibid.
The fiery blues soul singer Etta James ... Etta also pointed forward to both the Soul divas of the Sixties and Rock belters such as Janis Joplin. ibid.
Etta is now drug-free and recently underwent an operation to help her lose 200 pounds. She is now singing better than ever. ibid.
And so the Blues grew from its Mississippi roots and began to spread its influence far and away. ibid.
There’s a whole movement of music going on that you have absolutely no idea is going on. Why? Because it’s not reflected in the mainstream. And the mainstream continually tries to take us down roads which tell us what our tastes should be. Andy Thomas: The Age of Media Smugness, Alternative View III
Heavy metal sells more music than anything else. Classical sales are pitifully small. ibid.
That’s that cassette I was telling you about. I picked it up from that studio. They’re called Toy Department. Comic Strip Presents ... Private Enterprise starring Adrian Edmondson & Peter Richardson & Rik Mayall & Dawn French & Nigel Planer et al
Richardson: I’ve just thought how we can avoid Liverpool?
Edmondson: That shouldn’t be difficult; central governments have been doing it for years. ibid.
Every human culture has music at its centre. Dara O’Briain’s Science Club s1e6, BBC 2012
Valves have now mostly been replaced by transistors. ibid.
Music has surprising therapeutic powers. ibid.
Beat induction seems to be unique to humans. ibid.
You lose certain frequencies as you get older. ibid.
A 160GB MP3 player can hold 40,000 songs – that’s 160,000 minutes. ibid.
Synthesizers opened up a whole new world of instrumental sounds. ibid.
Not that long ago music was a rare and feeble whisper in a wilderness of silence. Howard Goodall’s Story of Music I: The Age of Discovery, BBC 2013
The ancient Greeks … they were mad about singing competitions. ibid.
The singing of chant has always been central to Christian worship. ibid.
Harmony was our first giant step … the other … the invention of musical notation. ibid.
Around the 12th century secular music began to step out into the limelight. ibid.
The pivot between the major third and the minor third is the pivot on which on all western music balances. ibid.
The basic chord – 1 -3 -5 – was king. ibid.
New instruments were changing the texture of music. ibid.
The dark cloud of agony and terror wasn’t going to last for ever. ibid.
[Claudio] Monteverdi paved the way for an explosion of music energy. ibid.
The techniques it relies on didn’t happen by accident. Someone somewhere thought of them first. Music can make us weep or make us dance. Howard Goodall’s Story of Music II: The Age of Invention
The years 1650 to 1750 were an age of invention and rapid innovation. ibid.
[Arcangelo] Corelli was the first violin virtuoso. ibid.
Vivaldi took the little group-big group idea one step further … The Four Seasons. ibid.
The latter half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth saw the lives and careers of some of the giants of European music. Howard Goodall’s Story of Music III: The Age of Elegance & Sensibility
In rock-n-roll those three chords are still the status quo. ibid.
The growth and popularity of the symphony. ibid.
Stamitz addressed the need for a guiding structure in orchestral music. ibid.
Haydn took the idea of proportion and balance and went one crucial step further … a sense of symmetry without simply repeating itself. ibid.
Symphonies: it’s abstract, more than a hundred and twenty years before the concept became fashionable in visual art. ibid.
Beethoven … started creating music beyond anything they’d imagined. ibid.
By making the music about him and his feelings, Beethoven was taking music in a new direction. ibid.
Schubert … human feelings above all at songwriting at which he was simply unmatched before the twentieth century. ibid.
No-one evoked a picture in sound better than Felix Mendelssohn. ibid.
Beethoven withdrew into a private sound world. ibid.
Chopin’s music is unusually intimate. ibid.