Music

Without music, life would be a mistake.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Passion, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and . . . music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

[On the nightingale:] Lord Zeus, listen to the little bird’s voice; he has filled the whole thicket with honeyed song.

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpoints to hack post-horses.

In summer the song sings itself above the muffled words—

And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens.

[ Groucho Marx speaking :] Come, Kapellmeister, let the violas throb! My regiment leaves at dawn.

Music is feeling, then, not sound.

De la musique avant toute chose .

What then is music? … It exists between thought and phenomenon, like a twilight medium, it stands between spirit and matter, related to and yet different from both; it is spirit, but spirit governed by time; it is matter, but matter that can manage without space.

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

Music is only love looking for words.

Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells.

Where words fail, music speaks.

The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music.

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes.

 

There is music in the air.