Quotes & Sayings About Debussy

If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered. — Claude Debussy

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory. — Claude Debussy

soothing: re-press of an old French recording of Ida Presti, possibly the greatest guitarist who ever lived, and her husband Alexandre Lagoya, pairing on Debussy's "Clair de Lune. — Jonathan Kellerman

Music is in the space between the notes. — Claude Debussy

Debussy
A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one. — H.L. Mencken

I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate. — D.H. Lawrence

Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes. — Claude Debussy

What I've learned is that it's okay to take from heroes, such as Debussy, but it has to be filtered through my own personality so that ultimately it's me. — William Kraft

Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree. — Terry Teachout

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn. — Claude Debussy

I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which is own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life 'means' nothing. But this is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque 'mean,' or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more
a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third. — Peter De Vries

I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine. — Patricia Highsmith

There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law. — Claude Debussy

Life is the space between our things. — Claude Debussy

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light. — Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy defined the guitar as an expressive harpsicord. I believe that is the best definition ever given of the Spanish guitar. This phrase is the starting point for my Concierto de Aranjuez Our guitar is the only survivor of the rich and anarchic instrumental wildlife of the Middle Ages. — Joaquin Rodrigo

There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature. — Claude Debussy

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams. — Claude Debussy

In opera, there is always too much singing. — Claude Debussy

The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry of a bird leave manifold impression in us. And suddenly, without our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language ... I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child. — Claude Debussy

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling. — Claude Debussy

When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel. — King Krule

To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love. — Claude Debussy

The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence. — Claude Debussy

He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting. — Claude Debussy

The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing. — Claude Debussy

I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. — Claude Debussy

People don't very much like things that are beautiful.. they are so far from their nasty little minds. — Claude Debussy

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind ... — Claude Debussy

Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music! — Dave Brubeck

It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion. — Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary ... — Claude Debussy

I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy so much as this. — Ernest Newman

I've always been a fan of the melancholy, like Morrissey. I grew up playing classical nocturnes like Chopin and Debussy on piano, so I write really melancholy lyrics and melodies — Blake Lewis

Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront. — Claude Debussy

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever. — Jessye Norman

Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles! — Claude Debussy

We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now. — Anne Dudley

For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel. — Ronald Frame

Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow. — Toru Takemitsu

Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes. — Claude Debussy

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art. — Claude Debussy

Extreme complication is contrary to art. — Claude Debussy

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art. — Claude Debussy

For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background. — Edward Rutherfurd

When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity ... — Claude Debussy

The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew. — Claude Debussy

Music is the silence between the notes. — Claude Debussy

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child. — Claude Debussy

The score of Pelleas and Melisande by Debussy, heralds that which will lift man from the earthly to the celestial, from the mortal to the immortal. Once again the ways of the artist and healer are merging. — Corinne Heline

Art is the most beautiful of all lies. — Claude Debussy

When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, Let's go. He's starting to develop. — Claude Debussy

People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception? — Claude Debussy

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy. — Maurice Ravel

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that. — Kurt Masur

Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps? — Claude Debussy

The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ . — Claude Debussy

The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward. — Pierre Schaeffer

I have no doubt that there are great people about though ... the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams). — Gary Lucas

Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them. — Claude Debussy

Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time ... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything. — Claude Debussy

Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is. — Claude Debussy

Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round. — Jose Bergamin

First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers. — Claude Debussy

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. — Claude Debussy

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers. — Joni Mitchell

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music. — Claude Debussy

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen. — Claude Debussy

On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly — Claude Debussy

When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: "I spent my days pursuing the nothingness -le rien - it creates." My job is to create that void, that rien.
Hunting knife — Haruki Murakami

I'd heard "Rhapsody in Blue" a thousand times and it always amazed me. It was so humble and then so bombastic. It was beautiful, bright, and terrifying: old and new, European and American. At times it sounded like Debussy, at times it sounded like Stravinsky, and at times it sounded like the Lower East Side in 1910.
"Rhapsody in Blue" was a quintessentially New York work of art, but it was also about moving from east to west, from the old world to the new... — Moby

Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part. — Claude Debussy

I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms. — Claude Debussy

All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass and Debussy. — Janet Fitch

Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile. — Claude Debussy

What I am trying to do is something different an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism , a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner , the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art. — Claude Debussy

My mother was a very talented pianist, and she was a music teacher who hated to teach music, actually, but she loved to play, so I was brought up with Chopin, Debussy and Mozart. — Peter C. Doherty

I am a classical fan. I like Debussy a lot, so I was trying to learn it on the piano. I've learned like a third of it, but I think I'm getting to a section that may be beyond my skill level. — Charlie Day

And now, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Beethoven's death, I would like to play 'Clear the Saloon', er, 'Clair de Lune', by Debussy. I don't play Beethoven so well, but I play Debussy very badly, and Beethoven would have liked that. — Victor Borge

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself. — Claude Debussy

There is nothing more musical than a sunset. — Claude Debussy

I wasn't trying to reach England. or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me."

You'd play your brother's own voice to him? After he died?"

"And Debussy."

Did he ever talk back?"

The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle's fright in the air.

"No," he says. "He never did. — Anthony Doerr

The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams. — Claude Debussy

If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing. — Claude Debussy