What is Music?

What is Music?

What is Music? – or should the question really be “What is Music to you?”

The following are quotes from Philosophers, Poets, Authors, and one musician (Debussy) which match some of the feelings/emotions/wishes that I have about Music. They may also help to explain why I have started this blog, and what I hope that it will help to achieve.

Is it “Odd” that I can listen to music like Pavel Dovgal, then listen to Naima or Mars (from Interstellar Space) by John Coltrane, switch to Acid Mothers Temple, Imogen Heap, Ravi Shankar, Stravinsky, Rory Gallagher, The Suns of Arqa, and then back to JS Bach?

If so, then is that why there is Music for the Masses? – hence Music – Not for the Masses?

 “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination
and life to everything.”
― Plato

 “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.”
― Victor Hugo

 “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

 “Music is the universal language of mankind.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Where words fail, music speaks.”
― Hans Christian Andersen

 “Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Where words leave off, music begins.”
― Heinrich Heine

“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.”
― Lao Tzu

“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”
― Henry David Thoreau

 “With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“Music is the shorthand of emotion.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.”

― Thomas Carlyle

“Music fills the infinite between two souls.”

― Rabindranath Tagore

“Music is the melody whose text is the world.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.”

― Claude Debussy

“And thus when by Poetry, —or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods — we find ourselves melted into tears — we weep then — not as the Abbaté Gravina supposes — through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.”

― Edgar Allan Poe