If Then Musical Quotes & Sayings

If I had a musical identity that was definable then it would be time to get into painting or something else. Race car driving. — Chris Cornell

I don't know if it will be my big comeback, but I think it is a statement - that I am a self-sustaining, vibrant, long-term artist, and I'm not going away! And if you don't give me credit, then the musical gods will! — Rufus Wainwright

I don't like to be entertaining. I don't like the feeling of being entertaining. If there was a musical or a comedy that was not just for entertainment but was rooted in something I could relate to on a real level, then I think I would do it. — Ryan Gosling

If I was a carpenter, and I was trying to maintain my father's musical legacy, then I guess it would be a burden because it wouldn't be natural to me to be dealing in music when my natural ability is in woodwork or whatever. But because my natural talent is also music, it kind of makes it much easier. — Stephen Marley

What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. — Vladimir Nabokov

What it does, that other resources do not, is gather under one cover a body of broadly applicable design principles, coupled with practical ideas and suggestions for making specific instruments. If you are interested in exploring instrumental sound, building something musical from scratch, or composing and performing with anything other than the usual commercially made instruments, then you will be glad to have the information provided here. So will anyone, for that matter, who simply wants to better understand musical sound. Acoustical — Bart Hopkin

To begin with, the key principle of American indie rock wasn't a circumscribed musical style; it was the punk ethos of DIY, or do-it-yourself. The equation was simple: If punk was rebellious and DIY was rebellious, then doing it yourself was punk. 'Punk was about more than just starting a band,' former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt once said, 'it was about starting a label, it was about touring, it was about taking control. It was like songwriting; you just do it. You want a record, you pay the pressing plant. That's what it was all about.' — Michael Azerrad

Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had been lucky enough to be born rich. He wasn't in the mad oligarch class but once you're past a certain point, the sheer weight of your money sucks in wealth like a financial singularity. If you're sensible enough not to blow it on race horses, cocaine or musical theatre, then it becomes a perpetual-motion money making machine. — Ben Aaronovitch

Every part of every song can have a totally different musical sound, because otherwise if I wanted to go from a verse of one song to the chorus of another, I'd have to go: "Uh, okay, press that pedal and then ... press that pedal, and then press that pedal off." — Annie E. Clark

I think the brain is a dynamic system in which some parts control or suppress other parts. And if perhaps one has damage in one of the controlling or suppressing areas, then you may have the emergence or eruption of something, whether it is a seizure, a criminal trait - - or even a sudden musical passion. — Oliver Sacks

As the book writer for one big smash and one big smelly flop, I always wondered if anyone knows just what goes into making a great musical. When a show is a hit, the critics trip over themselves not knowing who to laud and applaud the loudest. It's that marvelous score, those urbane lyrics, that irreplaceable star. But only when a show is a flop, does anyone notice the book writer. And then it's always our fault. — Harvey Fierstein

What's always exciting is when you hear something amazing when you least expected it. Every now and then I'll hear something for the first time that forces me to re-examine my frames of reference, and re-consider musical parameters in general, and that's wonderful . And what's even more wonderful in a way, is when you hear something that you know, and already think you have an opinion about, and then suddenly discover that it isn't what you thought it was, but something quite different, which makes it just as surprising as if you'd never heard it before. That's REALLY great! — Fred Frith

He looked so strange without his guns.
So wrong.
'Okay? Now that the numb-fuck apprentices have the guns and the master's unarmed, can we please go? If something big comes out of the bush at us, Roland, you can always throw your knife at it.'
'Oh, that,' he murmured. 'I almost forgot.' He took the knife from his purse and held it out, hilt first, to Eddie.
'This is ridiculous!' Eddie shouted.
'Life is ridiculous.'
'Yeah, put it on a postcard and send it to the fucking Reader's Digest.' Eddie jammed the knife into his belt and then looked defiantly at Roland. 'Now can we go?'
'There is one more thing,' Roland said.
'Weeping, creeping Jesus!'
The smile touched Roland's mouth again. 'Just joking,' he said.
Eddie's mouth dropped open. Beside him, Susannah began to laugh again. The sound rose, as musical as bells, in the morning stillness. — Stephen King

If Music is a Place
then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple. — Vera Nazarian

I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway? — Iain M. Banks

Basically I'm in the idea business
whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands. — Frank Zappa

One common thread ran through the comments: everybody loathes Ticketmaster, for assorted reasons, with the wonderful diversity that makes our country so vibrant. If James Bond movies and other international thrillers weary of their casts of modern stock villains - drug dealers, terrorists, polluting corporations - Ticketmaster is waiting in the wings, universally despised. And if such a movie proved incredibly popular and were then transmuted into a hit Broadway musical, Ticketmaster itself could scalp - sorry, resell - tickets to it. — Randy Cohen

GLINDA: Well,I'm a public figure now! People expect me to
ELPHABA: Lie?
GLINDA: (fiercely) Be encouraging! And what exactly have you been doing? Besides riding on around on that filthy thing!
ELPHABA: Well, we can't all come and go by bubble. Whose invention was that, the Wizard's? Of course, even if it wasn't, I'm sure he'd still take credit for it.
GLINDA: Yes, well, a lot of us are taking things that don't belong to us, aren't we?
Uh oh! The two stare daggers at each other, then ...
ELPHABA: Now, wait just a clock-tick. I know it's difficult for that blissful blonde brain of yours to comprehend that someone like him could actually choose someone like me!But it's happened. It's real. And you can wave that ridiculous wand all you want, you can't change it! He never belonged to you
he doesn't love you, he never did! He loves me! — Stephen Schwartz

Working with people, the musical part is one thing but the personal part is totally different and just as critical. If the friendship is there and it's a lasting friendship, then it will take care of itself. — John Mayall

I just want to do a movie musical and then if I could do some recording stuff, that would be amazing! I would die a happy woman! I really would. It doesn't take much! — Jasika Nicole

If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought. — Helen Keller

Play the gayest tunes in your books, play them loud and keep on playing them, and never mind if a bullet goes through a trombone, or even a trombonist, now and then. — Philip Sheridan

To me acting is a hobby and I'm inspired by it. And if I'm going to spend time doing something that I'm not really inspired to do, then why am I doing it? I don't know if that sounds sort of new agey or whatever, but it's true. I've been lucky enough to have a musical career that has gone pretty good and acting is something I have always wanted to do. — Justin Timberlake

If my musical tastes are continuing to grow up, and I am not really too interested in the music that my kids listen to, then I assume that the audience is doing the same. — Rick Derringer

If you take the creation of music and the creation of your own life values as your overall goal, then living becomes a musical process. — Cecil Taylor

I own all the characters I created, thanks to the Writers Guild, so nobody can do anything without me. The way it works is: If the copyright owners instigate a project, like the movie, then I get a fee as creator. If I instigate a project, like the musical, I pay a percentage to the copyright owners. — Sherwood Schwartz

It's definitely about the rhythm of the words and how they sound together, writing one sentence and then another and another and cutting something immediately if it doesn't feel true. I come from a family of musicians and - while I have no musical abilities of my own - I think I inherited a good ear. — Mary J. Miller

THE HOT (AND SERIOUSLY COOL) ENERGY that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of FELA! feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. There should be dancing in the streets! — Ben Brantley

If someone wants to say 'I love you' in a straight play, they say it, and then it's the other person's turn to talk. But in a song, you can sing about it for another three minutes. The musical form has that unique opportunity to express at length what joy really feels like. — Marsha Norman

The script is like music to me. I approach it like it's a musical piece and I hear how it's supposed to sound when people say the words. There's rhythms and there's intonations and things, and so, when somebody comes in and hits the notes that I hear, I go okay. Or, they come close enough, and then I'll say "Well how about you try it like this?" and if they have a good ear and they can pick it up, then I think okay, they've got it. — Rob Reiner

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, [Trout Mask Replica] was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. — Lester Bangs

Many listeners have the experience of sharing the feelings that seem to be expressed by a piece of music[.] [T]he listener mirrors the feelings expressed by the music.
[...] The problem is that if listeners mirror the negative emotions they hear in music, then we seem to be landed with a paradox; [...] the "paradox of tragedy[.]" [P]eople apparently take great delight in watching and hearing about people in hideously unhappy situations and undergoing terrible suffering. [...] The musical version of the paradox is this: If people actually feel sad when they listen to sad music, why do they go on doing it? All they have to do is leave the room or flip the switch, and the music would vanish, along with the pain it causes. Yet people continue to listen, apparently complacently, to the most anguished and wrenching strains. [...] There must be some value to experiencing the sadness in sad music, or otherwise people would not do it; but what value can it have? — Jenefer Robinson

A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain — Marcel Proust

Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then make up your own story. — Stephen Sondheim

One of my oldest friends from Kansas, his sister was married to Ben [Folds] and wrote lyrics on his first couple of albums. I got to meet him the first time I saw them in concert at The Bottleneck, a great bar in Lawrence, Kansas. Then, he was the musical guest my first or second week as a writer on SNL. I was like, "I don't know if you remember me?" And he was like, "Oh my god, yeah!" He's a big photography fan, as am I. — Jason Sudeikis

But should a sensation from the distant past-like those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them-enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears, even if the name seems not to have changed, we can still feel the distance between the various dreams which its unchanging syllables evoked for us in turn. For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint-forgotten, mysterious, and fresh-of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory. — Marcel Proust

I know, somewhere in me, that it's not her that's being stupid. I understand, on one level, that she doesn't know, that everything's up in the air. But that's no use to me. You know the worst thing about being rejected? The lack of control. If you could only control the when and how of being dumped by somebody, then it wouldn't seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn't be rejection, would it? It would be by mutual consent. It would be musical differences. I would be leaving to pursue a solo career. I know how unbelievably and pathetically childish it is to push and push like this for some degree of probability, but it's the only thing I can do to grab any sort of control back from her. — Nick Hornby

Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted? — Haruki Murakami

The way I see the job, my definition of it, is to create characters to the best of your ability and then fit into what's trying to be accomplished in the general framework of the film. I think that's whether you're doing this- even if you're doing musical theater. That's what I think an actors job is. I don't know. I like to think what an actors job is is to create characters. — Anton Yelchin

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think. — Johnny Cash