Words & Music – Three
“I want someone to make me music I can live in like a house.”
The Cock & The Harlequin, Jean Cocteau
Most musicians, I think, would prefer to have the house. Whether or not they get it depends on enough listeners paying rent in the tower of their songs or their passing a civil service aptitude test. [...]
Words & Music – Two
“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”
Private Lives, Noel Coward
Sometimes mangled as “Strange how potent…” or “Never underestimate the potency…”, it is the ordinariness that is the heart of the statement. When Amanda Prynne leans over that balcony with her former husband, the insistently-familiar tune from a far-off orchestra conspires to stir extraordinary memories and feelings [...]
Words & Music – One
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
Orig. Unknown, Attributed to Elvis Costello, Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, Frank Zappa, Charlie Mingus… etc.
It would not be so difficult to dance about architecture, although, if the building is very big, it may take some time to move all the way around it. Dancing, critically, on [...]
The Musiphilosoph, Explained.
Section The First
“In that respect I was much better off than he was, for my progress was not slowed down by any Prizes, whether from Rome or any other town since I don’t carry that sort of thing on me or on my back, because I’m a type rather like Adam (the ‘Paradise’ Adam) who [...]
Mr. Moondog
The Musiphilosoph, Explained; The First In A Life-Long Series.
“If I kept a hotel room, then I wouldn’t have enough money to hire a copyist to copy the music or to go up to my place (near Ithaca), because to make a trip up there would cost $50, including carfare and food for a few weeks. [...]
A City’s Immersion In Morricone
“I invented the formula of ‘music composed, arranged and conducted by Ennio Morricone’.”
Ennio Morricone, in interview with Adam Sweeting, 2001.
Mr. McLean strode onstage first, humbled or charmed or one of the states one can’t discern from a distance. The wings of his shirt collar ruffled like those of a roused rooster, his hands wringing the [...]
