Famous Quotes from the Greats-

"I write [music] as a sow piddles."
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer."
Cole Porter

"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already."
Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve."
Xavier Cugat

"[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art."
Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.

"The amount of money one needs is terrifying..."
Ludwig van Beethoven

"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living."
Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer

"Chaos is a friend of mine."
Bob Dylan

"There is nothing more difficult than talking about music."
Camille Saint-Saens

"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet."
Niccolo Paganini

"Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day."
Ringo Starr

"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?"
Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats."
Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan.

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."
Oscar Wilde

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together."
Mel Brooks

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years."
William F. Buckley, Jr.

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow."
Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Mark Twain

"I love Beethoven, especially the poems."
Ringo Starr

"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently."
James Gibbons Hunekar

"If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder."
Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."
Sergei Prokofiev

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra... Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?"
Dimitri Mitropolous

"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way."
Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

"Already too loud!"
Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments.

"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere."
Frederic Chopin

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano."
Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
Richard Strauss

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

"An exotic and irrational entertainment."
Samuel Johnson's definition of opera

"If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it."
Pierre Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville

"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings."
Robert Benchley

"I'd hate this to get out, but I really like opera."
Ford Frick (Commissioner of Baseball)

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!"
Gioacchino Rossini

"Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica."
Sir Thomas Beecham

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse."
Bing Crosby

"Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. (Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.)"
Glenn Gould

"A ponderous orchestral absurdity."
Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic

"It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness."
Jerry Garcia

Music Glossary Definitions

Music Terminology
In an effort to keep you abreast of the ever-changing world of music terminology, we provide you with some terms with which you should be familiar:

Adagio Fromaggio:
To play in a slow and cheesy manner.

AnDante:
A musical composition that is infernally slow.

Angus Dei:
To play with a divine, beefy tone.

Anti-phonal:
Referring to the prohibition of cell phones in the concert hall.

A Patella:
Unaccompanied knee-slapping.

Appologgiatura:
A composition, solo or instrument, you regret playing.

Approximatura:
A series of notes played by a performer, not intended by the composer.

Approximento:
A musical entrance that is somewhere in the vicinity of the correct pitch.

Bar Line:
What musicians form after a concert.

Concerto Grossissimo:
A really bad performance.

Coral Symphony:
(see Beethoven-Caribbean period).

Cornetti Trombosis Disastrous:
The entanglement of brass instruments that can occur when musicians exit hastily down the stage stairs

Dill Piccolino:
A wind instrument that plays only sour notes.

Fermantra:
A note that is held over and over and over and ...
Fermoota: A rest of indefinite length and dubious value.

Fog Hornoso:
A sound that is heard when the conductor's intentions are not clear.

Frugalhorn:
A sensible, inexpensive brass instrument.

Gaul Blatter:
A French horn player.

Good Conductor:
A person who can give an electrifying performance, or alternative use, one who obeys the orchestra and/or chorus

Gregorian Champ:
Monk who can hold a note the longest.

Kvetchendo:
Gradually getting annoyingly louder.

Mallade:
A romantic song that's pretty awful.

Molto bolto:
Head straight for the ending.

Opera buffa:
Musical stage production by nudists.

Poochini Musical:
performance accompanied by a dog.

Pre-Classical Conservatism:
School of thought which fostered the idea, "if it ain't baroque, don't fix it."

Spritzicato:
Plucking of a stringed instrument to produce a bright, bubbly sound, usually accompanied by sparkling water with lemon (wine optional).

Tempo Tantrumo:
When a young band refuses to keep time with the conductor.

Tincanabulation:
The annoying or irritating sounds made by extremely cheap bells.

Vesuvioso:
A gradual buildup to a fiery conclusion.

ZZZfortzando:
Playing REALLY loud in order to wake up the audience.