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Music Quotes about & from Musicians & Composers - Page 5
Commentary © 2007 - 2008  Richard J. Chandler & Bonnett Chandler

Aretha Franklin

The youngest recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor and the first black woman to appear on the cover of Time magazine, Aretha Franklin is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. Known for many years as “The Queen of Soul”, she is also adept at jazz, rock, blues, pop, and gospel. Franklin has won nineteen Grammy Awards in total during her nearly half-century long career (she first charted in 1961), and currently holds the record for most Best Female R&B Vocal Performance wins with eleven to her name, as well as the Living Legend Grammy and the Lifetime Achievement Grammy as well. On February 8, 2008 Franklin will be honored as MusiCares Person of the Year. In 1987, she became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She has an honorary ‘Doctor of Musicology’ degree from the University of Detroit, an honorary ‘Doctor of Music’ degree by the Berklee College of Music, and an honorary ‘Doctor of Music’ degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1999, she was awarded ‘The National Medal of Arts’ by President Clinton and in 2005, she was awarded ‘The Presidential Medal of Freedom’ by President George W. Bush. She sang at Clinton’s Inaugural gala as well as at Martin Luther King’s funeral and in 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked her #9 on their list of the ‘100 Greatest Artists of All Time’. Her powerful voice and massive vocal range caused the Michigan legislature to declare her voice one of the state’s natural resources.      
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“If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it's good. But if it's alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.”

“I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.”

“I always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.”

“I’m a big woman. I need big hair.”

“I’m the lady next door when I’m not on stage.”

"I believe in the tradition of great music - solid songs, intelligent lyrics, superb accompaniment, and flawless production. That’s how I was brought up, and that's how I maintain standards.”

              

“Don't say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!”

“Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I’m using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I’m happy with that.”

“I think the hardest thing is losing weight. That’s the hardest thing more than anything else.”

“Trying to grow up is hurting, you know. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them, and when you don’t, it hurts even more.”

“My faith always has been and always will be important to me.”

“I am Aretha, upbeat, straight-ahead, and not to be worn out by men and left singing the blues.”

“I never felt inferior or less than.  I was blessed to grow up in a environment where self-worth was underscored.”

“If I have reached the goal of being a good mother, and have been a guiding light and have inspired my sons to be proud, creative, independent, and productive citizens, then I have reached a priceless pinnacle in parenting.”

“Soul music is cultural, and it should forever be enshrined as one of the world’s greatest forms of music. It’s a people, a nation.”

 – Aretha Franklin  (1942- )

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Bill Cosby still enjoys a successful comedy and acting career as well as excelling in higher education. More recently, he is known for his strong advocacy for education and a strong work ethic as the prescription for achievement.

“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

- Bill Cosby  (1937- )

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Joni Mitchell

Canadian Joni Mitchell began her career in Toronto, performing in small nightclubs and busking, joined the New York folk music scene of the mid-1960s, and eventually settled in California, performing, singing, songwriting and painting. At home combining styles of pop, jazz and folk along with complex sonorities also heard in modern classical music, she has been and continues to be highly original, iconoclastic and hauntingly resonant to many a listener on both an emotional and intellectual level. Her recent album of new songs, Shine, was released in 2007.  Her work as a visual artist is seen on the cover art of her LP’s and CD’s as well as in galleries worldwide.

“At the point where I’m trying to force something and it’s not happening, and I’m getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.”

“You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it’s just complaining.”

“And maybe it’s the time of year. Yes, and maybe it’s the time of man. And I don't know who I am. But life is for learning.”

                             

“Back then, I didn’t have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn’t enough time.”

“Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It’s a bad time to be right.”

“Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.”

“My songs to a certain degree contain a document of incidents that happened. Sometimes it takes many years to write about them… they’re not necessarily chronological.”

“I would have been an athlete, but I had a lot of childhood illnesses that developed a solitude and a deepening and fostered ‘artisticness’.”

                                 

“There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.”

“They paved paradise   And put up a parking lot,  With a pink hotel,   A boutique, and a swinging hot spot.”  (from ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ 1970 song)

“I think I’m a habitual documenter, visually and song-ically. I think the chords I choose are a document of where I’m at any given time, that they depict - if not the state I’m in at the time that I create it - at least the companion for the story.”

“I am in a very small space. I have one TV channel, and I don’t really like listening to much music right now. I'm still making peace with music. I only listen to a little bit, Debussy and [Igor] Stravinsky and stuff.”

“I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all.”

Joni Mitchell (1943- )

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Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels, short stories and essays. On a personal note, Bonnett and I have read most all his works and found them to be bitingly funny and poignant commentaries on hypocrisy in a multitude political, social and personal of guises.  

“Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.”

- Kurt Vonnegut  (1922-2007)

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Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, considered to be the most influential music composer of modern times, was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. He supplemented his royalty income by conducting, playing piano and recording his works.

Stravinsky wrote music with the craft of a fine jeweler and much of it has entered the standard repertory. His work embraced multiple compositional styles, revolutionized orchestration, spanned several genres, practically reinvented ballet form and incorporated idioms from multiple cultures, languages and literature. As a consequence, his influence on composers both during his lifetime and after his death was, and remains, considerable. Twentieth century rock musician Frank Zappa and Jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker openly credit Stravinsky as a major influence.

Stravinsky displayed an inexhaustible desire to learn and explore art, literature, and life and this desire manifested itself in several of his Paris collaborations. Not only was he the principal composer for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but he also collaborated with Pablo Picasso (Pulcinella, 1920), Jean Cocteau (Oedipus Rex, 1927) and George Balanchine (Apollon musagète, 1928).

His rich life has been primarily chronicled by his second wife, Vera Stravinsky, and Robert Craft, who championed Stravinsky’s later music. It may be assumed that the Stravinsky’s pet parrots grew to be among the most musically sophisticated birds of all time.

“I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.”

“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.”

“What force is more potent than love?”

“It’s one of nature’s ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.”

“Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.”

“Never look at the trombones. You’ll only encourage them.”

- Igor Stravinsky  (1882-1971)

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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy was built around themes of individualism, non-dualism and the American philosophy that evolved through his writings, Thoreau’s, and his godson, William James’ work, Transcendentalism.

“Music takes us out of the ordinary and whispers secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

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Billie Holiday

Born Eleanora Fagan, later nicknamed Lady Day, Billie Holiday is regarded as one of the greatest female jazz vocalists of all time. She started singing for tips in the early 1930s at various Harlem nightclubs, had brief stints with the orchestras of Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and was a Columbia recording artist. Her signature style was best showcased with ballads. Long after her death, she continued to influence singers with her poignant voice and exquisite phrasing including the likes of Janis Joplin and Diana Ross.

Due to her involvement with disreputable, abusive boyfriends and husbands as well as her own downward spiral via drug and alcohol addiction, she mismanaged her money and was swindled out of it throughout her lifetime. Billie died at age 44 of cirrhosis of the liver with only seventy cents in her possession.

“You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.”

“If I don’t have friends, then I ain’t got nothing.”

“They think they can make fuel from horse manure - now, I don’t know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.”

“Sometimes it’s worse to win a fight than to lose.”

“Mama may have, papa may have,
But God bless the child that’s got his own!”

“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.”

- Billie Holiday  (1915-1959)

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Tony Bennett

Tony Bennett, who is widely considered to be one of the best singers of the past two centuries, is an American icon who saw his career decline in the 70’s with the advent of rock and roll. Keeping true to his repertoire of popular and jazz standards, however, Bennett staged a successful comeback in the 90’s, expanding his audience to a younger generation and singing with popular artists such as Christina Aguilera, Sheryl Crow and k.d. lang. (Lower case as she prefers.) Frank Sinatra once said of Bennett, “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”

“My record royalties right now are four times stronger than when I was the Madonna of my day, ... Now it’s over the top. I mean the records, they all hold up through the years.”

“Intimate singing had a wonderful style in the '30s and '40s. It came out of Broadway and the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. But Sinatra created the best romantic era that we’ve ever had.”

“The young people look great on television. They’re youthful and have a lot of zip and energy, but when you see them live, they can only do about 20 minutes because they haven’t got the training to hold an audience for an hour and a half or so.”

 - Tony Bennett (1926- )

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Leonard Bernstein

As a pianist, conductor, composer, educator, and long-time music director of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein received worldwide acclaim for his wide-ranging musical genius. As a young man, he chose not to act on career advice to change his Jewish name to a more Western European sounding one. He is perhaps most known for composing the beautiful ‘West Side Story’ in 1957. Here are four quotes by Bernstein.

“I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.”

 - Leonard Bernstein  (1918-1990)

 

“Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.”

 - Leonard Bernstein  (1918-1990)

 

“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”

 - Leonard Bernstein  (1918-1990)

 

“I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed it.”

 - Leonard Bernstein  (1918-1990)

 

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