Quotes & Sayings About Music Students

I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students. — Burt Bacharach

I'm a big fan of music, I'm a student of music, and I just wanna learn and keep enhancing my education about the music. — Troy Andrews

So when you enjoy the beats, the rock music - maybe even toned down with an orchestra - you are enjoying the spirit of the black race. And that's what I emphasize to the students. — Warren Jeffs

The modified Mozart used by Tomatis, Paul, iLs, and others over time in an individualized therapy must be distinguished from claims made in the media in the 1990s that mothers could raise the IQ of their children by having them briefly listen to unfiltered Mozart. This claim was based on a study not of mothers and babies but of college students who listened to Mozart ten minutes a day and improved IQ scores on spatial reasoning tests - an effect that lasted only ten to fifteen minutes! Hype aside, different studies by Gottfried Schlaug, Christo Pantev, Laurel Trainor, Sylvain Moreno, and Glenn Schellenberg have shown that sustained music training, such as learning to play an instrument, can lead to brain change, enhance verbal and math skills, and even modestly increase IQ.] — Norman Doidge

One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment - you can't screw it up) I really got hot. After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the bandleader said, "Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way, that big shot this party was supposed to be for - you know, he never came down here; I never did see who it was! — Richard Feynman

American students, we are told, are falling behind in reading and math; on test after test, they score below most European students (at the level of Lithuania), and the solution, rather than seeking to engage their curiosity, has been testing and more testing - a dry and brittle method that produces lackluster results. And so resources are pulled from the "soft" fields that are not being tested. Music teachers are being fired or not replaced; art classes are quietly dropped from the curriculum; history is simplified and moralized, with little expectation that any facts will be learned or retained; and instead of reading short stories, poems and novels, students are invited to read train schedules and EPA reports whose jargon could put even the most committed environmentalist to sleep. — Azar Nafisi

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound. — Edward Albee

Zazen's music is composed in other dimensions and it is played by some of my students. I go through the music they have played with my aura and wash out anything impure. — Frederick Lenz

Much music teaching seems more concerned with controlling the student than with encouraging the student's own impulses. — William Westney

There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans. — Helen Thomas

The sunset was spectacular, and they were safe in the minibus with the students from Estonia who were on their way to Salzburg for the Sound of Music tour. Jonah sat up front with girls and led a sing-along.
Who would have guessed that the hip-hop star knew all the words to "Climb Ev'ry Mountain"? — Jude Watson

Casals says music fills him with the wonder of life and the 'incredible marvel' of being a human. Ives says it expands his mind and challenges him to be a true individual. Bernstein says it is enriching and ennobling. To me, that sounds like a good cause for making music and the arts an integral part of every child's education. Studying music and the arts elevates children's education, expands students' horizons, and teaches them to appreciate the wonder of life. — Richard Riley

Mrs. Heath wanted to sprinkle their minds with grass seed and watch the blades spike up through the earth, flat and predictable as a golf course. She wanted dependable students, well fed but not necessarily nourished. But he was not in that category. Admittedly, he could not count on his perceptions of letters and words, and he was not always accurate. He misused words most when he liked their sound. A sentence had a kind of music, and the word sounded right. The definitions were never as interesting as the sound they made coming out of your mouth. He rolled their flavors around on his tongue, tasting every nook and cranny, but he could not be trusted to deliver the right answer and she would never give him better than a C, no matter what genius work he produced. The way he saw it, his mind was a big unruly field of wildflowers. One day he would shower the world with blossoms. — Elizabeth Brundage

I recommend my students not to be professional unless they really have to be. I tell them, 'If you love music, sell Hoovers or be a plumber. Do something useful with your life.' — Robert Fripp

I go to universities to talk to the students and teach them how to watch movies. Movies have so many elements - acting, music, art direction, costumes. I also tell them not to watch pirated movies. At the cinema, they can enjoy the big screen and the surround sound. — Andrew Lau

Do everything you can to learn your craft. Score student films for free, attend conferences, learn music theory - do anything (and everything) you can. — John Keltonic

The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. She has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes, that she has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our songs, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music to avoid some flub that will get us in dutch. — Robert Farrar Capon

Elementary and high school students will still be tested under the new law. There just won't be so much riding on the scores. Also the arts didn't disappear under the old law, No Child Left Behind. But, Christopher Woodside of the National Association for Music Education says with so much time spent testing math and reading, the arts suffered. — Elizabeth Blair Lee

Before I went on stage at Kyle Hutton's Real Life Real Music Festival, I heard one of his songwriting students, Abbey Hirvela, sing; she was in the poet's saddle and riding that horse like she owned it. She was good! I probably ruined her by showing her how to make an E chord without the 3rd though. — Ray Wylie Hubbard

There I was, listening to four students play something that had been written in another time in another country and it seemed like nothing less than magic. The music was mournful and all I could think about was how unhappy Mr Tchaikovsky must have been when he wrote it. Whatever his pain was, I thought I knew exactly how he felt. — Harry Cauley

I would be devastated if my son could not have music as part of his curriculum in school. It should not be a choice between culture and technical training - well-rounded students and graduates will make appropriate choices for their careers, but they must also be trained to make appropriate social choices. — David Cassidy

The virtuosos look to the students of the world to do their share in the education of the great musical public. Do not waste your time with music that is trite or ignoble. Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Saharas of musical trash. — Sergei Rachmaninoff

This practical musicality was a comprehensive craft that involved thinking creatively and realizing it in sound. Music meant more than merely following instructions. The rote repetition of other people's music, including Bach's own, was used as example and was not the end itself. Students were encouraged to alter scores by adding notes, reducing the time value of notes, dropping notes, and changing or adding ornamentation, dynamics, and so on. One couldn't even get into Bach's teaching studio without first showing some rudimentary composing ability. — Scott Jarrett

The best part of the high school in Hastings must have been the Music Department. Its orchestra and concert band did well in county competitions, and the dance band formed by its students was the best in the region. I played lead trumpet in all of them. — Edmund Phelps

We weren't straight-A students. We didn't start playing until we were teenagers, and we started playing rock and roll and punk rock - power chords - before we ever thought we would play folk music. So virtuosity was just never in my reach. — Ketch Secor

Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work. — Jon Appleton

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country. — Jackson Browne

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination? — Toni Morrison

Music is about communication, creativity, and cooperation, and by studying music in schools, students have the opportunity to build on these skills, enrich their lives, and experience the world from a new perspective. — William J. Clinton

The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt or attraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theater, sports, conversation and sex. This is a town of dry cleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. These pictures have not changed in years. The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other states. This is a town of tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids. — Don DeLillo

Education should aim at destroying free will so that
pupils thus schooled, will be incapable throughout
the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise
than as their schoolmasters would have wished ...
Influences of the home are obstructive; and in order
to condition students, verses set to music and repeatedly
intoned are very effective ... It is for a
future scientist to make these maxims precise and
to discover exactly how much it costs per head to
make children believe that snow is black. When the
technique has been perfected, every government that
has been in charge of education for more than one
generation will be able to control its subjects securely
without the need of armies or policemen. — Bertrand Russell

I told my students the other day in class, which is about the spirituality and creativity as much as it is about music. I said, 'If you're walking down the street and you see a baby carriage, and there's a baby in the carriage; you look down and your eyes meet the eyes of the baby. The baby looks at you: That's the kind of moment you're in when you're playing. — Charlie Haden

I remember, when I was in college, an anonymous donor gave Stanford students a year of 'Yahoo Music Engine'. — Mike Krieger

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that. — Brian Eno

I was mostly an indoor girl at university. Where other students did drama or music or sport alongside their degrees, I wrote. I used to work on essays and classwork during the day and 'The Bone Season' in the evenings. — Samantha Shannon

By playing happy or sad music, displaying different emotionally moving photographs, or giving different kinds of feedback to participants during a taxing task, researchers can manipulate participants' affective responses. This proves the variability of affective states in response to constantly changing surroundings and social interactions. Of course classrooms are rife with changing conditions that influence students' affective states. — Anne Meyer

I would rather instill in my amateur students love, than knowledge, of music. Left with only knowledge, they will at the end close their books and consign the course to forgetfulness. But if they have learned to love but the smallest part of the art, they are likely to pursue some phase of it the rest of their lives. — Ernst Bacon

When I was 17, I taught music; I had 65 students a week, and I did that for a year. So that's pretty regular. But it was great to give the gift of music to people, seeing them learn. It's great to influence young people in a creative way. — Matt Schulze

Unlike at the Academy or the Lyceum, women, some of them concubines and mistresses, as well as a few slaves, joined the conversation; further, many of the students here had arrived without academic credentials in mathematics or music, de rigueur for entry to the other Athenian schools of higher learning. Everyone in the Garden radiated earnestness and good cheer. The subject under discussion was happiness. — Epicurus

My students frequently ask what their next project should be. My advice: immerse yourself in the music you love and you will find what you want to do; you will discover your next project. — Lukas Foss

Teenagers are passionate and they want music that speaks within their hearts. It's a big deal for students to listen to Christian music and talk about it at school. Music is a very exciting element of your life when you're love. I think it's huge. — Mark Hall

I sometimes tell students the only guarantee you've got is the music and no-one can take that away from you. Only you can take that away from you-by not practicing and not putting in enough elbow grease. The more you put into your music, the more your passion for it will grow. — Mike Stern

The Mozart Effect comes to mind: the popular idea that listening to classical music makes students better at math. — John Medina

I encourage film students who are interested in cinematography to study sculpture, paintings, music, writing and other arts. Filmmaking consists of all the arts combined. Students are always asking me for advice, and I tell them that they have to be enthusiastic, because it's hard work. The only way to enjoy it is to be totally immersed. If you don't get involved on that level, it could be a very miserable job. I only have one regret about my career: I'm sorry that we are not making silent movies any more. That is the purest art form I can imagine. — Vilmos Zsigmond

I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it, a composer. He puts a lot of dots down and beautiful music comes out. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there - a white rectangle in a theater - and it has to be filled. — Alfred Hitchcock

Set foot in his classroom, and you'll see that he hasn't quite given up on these dreams. True to his compulsive nature and eclectic taste, he punctuates his courses with entertaining routines to keep his students engaged, playing four songs at the start of each class and tossing candy bars to the first students who shout out the correct answers to music trivia. This is how a poster of a rapper ended up on his wall. "If you want to engage your audience, if you really want to grab their attention, you have to know the world they live in, the music they listen to, the movies they watch," he explains. "To most of these kids, accounting is like a root canal. But when they hear me quote Usher or Cee Lo Green, they say to themselves, 'Whoa, did that fat old white-haired guy just say what I thought he said?' And then you've got 'em. — Adam M. Grant

I've been playing videogames since before my career in this business, but what happened is several videogame companies were recruiting students back then and I applied with barely any hope of getting accepted to any of the companies. However, I got accepted! Although my path was already set to become a piano instructor, I chose the path of videogames instead. My parents cried, my friends were worried and my teacher was stunned (we're talking about way back when game music wasn't as popular as it is these days). — Yoko Shimomura

So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians. — Branford Marsalis

I tell my students, 'It's an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn its language all the way through. How are you going to know what's new to play, if you haven't listened to everything that's old?' — Jackie McLean

Both of my parents are music teachers. My mother owns the school that I taught in. My brothers and sisters are musicans. My mom pushed me all the time. She knew that I could do it. She knew more than I did. She thought I would go somewhere. She gave me the job and helped me get equipment, which a lot of parents don't do. Alot of my students had to go out and fight for it. — Randy Rhoads

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly ... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees. — Andres Segovia

And that is why I would propose that, in our teaching of the humanities, we should emphasize the enduring creations of the past. The schools should stay as far from contemporary works as possible. Because of the nature of the communications industry, our students have continuous access to the popular arts of their own times - its music, rhetoric, design, literature, architecture. Their knowledge of the form and content of these arts is by no means satisfactory. But their ignorance of the form and content of the art of the past is cavernous. — Neil Postman

The world is in great need of more music education. When students play music, it allows a part of their artistic mind to express itself, which is very important in helping to balance a child intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. — Paul Reed Smith

I have students who are PhDs in music who come back and scored the music and teach the kids the instruments that I don't know how to play. Those are the points of light, the former students. — Rafe Esquith