“Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe”
— Douglas Adams
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Twyford
Folk Music
Workshop

Twyford Folk Music Workshop

Quotations

If you like the quotations that appear at the top of each page, or maybe just some of them, here is the full set:

source sort added sort
The truest expression of a people is in its dance and musicAgnes de Mile20/03/2018
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressureAlbert Einstein07/06/2020
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is musicAldous Huxley06/03/2018
I love all those great F-words – feminism, folk music…Ani DiFranco20/06/2021
There once was a brainy baboon,
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
For he said, “It appears
That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune”
Arthur Eddington22/11/2022
Without a song or a dance what are we?Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus (Thank You for the Music)13/08/2023
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday lifeBerthold Auerbach06/03/2018
New Rule: Stop calling bagpipes a musical instrument. They’re actually a Scottish breathalyzer test. You blow into one end, and if the sound that comes out the other end doesn’t make you want to kill yourself you’re not drunk enoughBill Maher24/07/2023
Folk music is a bunch of fat peopleBob Dylan16/07/2023
One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no painBob Marley06/03/2018
What I like about pop music, and why I’m still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk musicBono16/07/2023
Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do withoutConfucius06/03/2018
You can do anything to music – it doesn’t mindDave Swarbrick21/03/2018
He had a bike and he got about a bitDave Swarbrick on lusty Scottish fiddler Scott Skinner03/11/2022
After a tune is played, the notes just float away – there’s nothing to tidy upDavid Phillpot21/03/2018
Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universeDouglas Adams06/03/2018
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never diesEdward Bulwer-Lytton07/06/2020
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paidFrank Zappa07/06/2020
Without music, life would be a mistakeFriedrich Nietzsche06/03/2018
Folk music is the original melody of man; it is the musical mirror of the worldFriedrich Nietzsche20/06/2021
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in musicGeorge Eliot20/03/2018
Where words fail, music speaksHans Christian Andersen31/07/2019
The only truth is musicJack Kerouac06/03/2018
Without music, life would be a blank to meJane Austen06/03/2018
When the music’s over, turn out the lightsJim Morrison (When the Music’s Over)26/09/2018
‘Ah, music,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘A magic beyond all we do here!’JK Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)13/09/2018
I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk musicJohn Lydon [aka Johnny Rotten]06/03/2018
A lot of English traditional music is guesswork anyway, so it’s very difficult for people to be vehemently opposed to experimenting with itJohn Spiers04/11/2022
When people tell me, ‘God has blessed you with the gift of music’, you’re damn right I get offended. I did not practise hours a day for eighteen years to have my success attributed to a mythJosh Groban15/06/2018
Country is based on folk music, which has been around for centuries. So has the plagueKaren Chance16/07/2023
Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bonesKeith Richards06/03/2018
Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony?Leonardo DaVinci20/03/2018
If it was never new and it never gets old then it’s a folk songLlewyn Davis20/06/2021
All music is folk music: I ain’t never heard no horse sing a songLouis Armstrong06/03/2018
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and inventsLudwig van Beethoven20/03/2018
My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the bluesMark Knopfler06/03/2018
Tunes help you breathe more easilyMars Ltd25/08/2018
I’m not interested in heritage – this stuff is aliveMartin Carthy20/03/2018
I was involved in the Great Folk Music scare back in the sixties, when it almost caught onMartin Mull20/06/2021
Folk music has always contained a concern for the human conditionMary Travers16/07/2023
Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dancesMaya Angelou31/07/2019
This is a book for every fiddler who has realised halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into itNeil Gaiman (The Good Fairies of New York)02/11/2023
Folk music has pretty powerful medicine for changing your heartPaul Stookey06/03/2018
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs,
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music
Percy Bysshe Shelley30/07/2019
The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would bePete Seeger12/01/2023
Life without music would be like a human being without sensePharrell Williams12/01/2023
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everythingPlato06/03/2018
The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddlesRalph Waldo Emerson22/11/2022
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes togetherRichard Nixon (evidently a stranger to the keys C, Am & F# pentatonic)12/01/2023
No shindig is half complete without that famous polka beat
That’s why they invite me, I suppose
Waltzes, strathspeys, eightsome reels, now you know how good it feels
Crank that handle babe, away she goes
Richard Thompson (Don’t sit on my Jimmy Shands)26/09/2018
Music is the wine that fills the cup of silenceRobert Fripp06/03/2018
The way I see it, rock’n’roll is folk musicRobert Plant16/07/2023
In Shetland they have more fiddles per head than anywhere else on earth… so they’re never short of firewoodSimon Nicol06/11/2022
There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heardSun Tzu (what would he have made of Gweilos’ tricksy 7-note scales?)12/01/2023
But this didn’t feel like magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt like musicTerry Pratchett (Soul Music)04/11/2022
The accordionist played a long drawn-out chord, the legal signal that a Morris Dance is about to begin, and people who hang around after this have only got themselves to blameTerry Pratchett (Wintersmith)06/06/2020
Hark the Herald Tribune sings Advertising wondrous thingsTom Lehrer (A Christmas carol)06/03/2018
We are the folk song army
Every one of us cares
We all hate poverty, war and injustice
Unlike the rest of you squares
Tom Lehrer (Folk Song Army)16/07/2023
I know only two tunes: one of them is Yankee Doodle, and the other isn’tUlysses S Grant22/11/2022
If music is a place then jazz is the city, folk is the wilderness, rock is the road, classical is a templeVera Nazarin12/01/2023
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silentVictor Hugo06/03/2018
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus
William Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice)31/07/2019
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die
William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)06/03/2018
It’s a folk singer’s job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable peopleWoody Guthrie06/03/2018
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