Musicologist Quotes & Sayings

According to the science writer Philip Ball, when it was pointed out to musicologist Deryck Cooke
that Slavic and much Spanish music use minor keys for happy music, he claimed that their lives
were so hard that they didn't really know what happiness was anyway. — David Byrne

It's lonely on the top when there's no one on the bottom. — Rodney Dangerfield

Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular." — Pete Seeger

I'm really a very weak musicologist. Wish it weren't so, but there's only so much you can dig deeply into in one lifetime, as if you hadn't noticed. — Wendy Carlos

My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia. — Pete Seeger

I grew up in Ohio, and I was a musicologist since I was little; it is all that I would ever read. — Nina Blackwood

I'm sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It's just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that's partly my job this time around. — Bonnie Raitt

Their own life together was like a subtle watercolor sketch, invisible to other people. They gave the world what it required of them and for the rest of the time were content to be forgotten. — Andrei Makine

I didn't graduate high school, so I never got a teacher's education, I'm mostly self-read, self-taught. I always loved music, so I would probably either be in a band with another group of people, or an arranger, a producer, a musicologist, a music history guy, something to do with music. Either that, or I would probably be in jail. Or dead. — Billy Joel

Whatever ignominy or disgrace we have incurred, it is almost always in our power to reestablish our reputation. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it. — Thomas Beecham

It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev's definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them - that is a musicologist. — Julian Barnes

The trouble with unknown enemies is that they are so difficult to identify. — Elizabeth Peters

As a servant of love every exchange passes through the practice. — Bryant McGill

Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think - of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what'll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster - depression, hyperinflation - and then it'll be showtime: We'll either wake up and retake our freedom or we'll fall apart utterly. Like Rome - conqueror of its own people. — David Foster Wallace

I am a musicologist, a doctor of music. Therefore I listened to, studied and analysed a lot of music. I also enjoy metaphors, the art of quoting and of cycles. — James Horner