If you like the quotations that appear at the top of each page, or
maybe just some of them, here is the full set:
| The truest expression of a people
is in its dance and music | Agnes de Mile |
| 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 pressure | Albert Einstein |
| After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music | Aldous Huxley |
| Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life | Berthold Auerbach |
| One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain | Bob Marley |
| Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without | Confucius |
| You can do anything to music – it doesn’t mind | Dave Swarbrick |
| After a tune is played, the notes just float away – there’s no need to tidy up | David Phillpot |
| 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 |
| Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies | Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
| Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid | Frank Zappa |
| Without music, life would be a mistake | Friedrich Nietzsche |
| There is no feeling,
except the extremes of fear and grief,
that does not find relief in music | George Eliot |
| Where words fail, music speaks | Hans Christian Andersen |
| The only truth is music | Jack Kerouac |
| Without music, life would be a blank to me | Jane Austen |
| When the music’s over, turn out the lights | Jim Morrison |
| ‘Ah, music,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘A magic beyond all we do here!’ | JK Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) |
| I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music | John Lydon |
| 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 myth | Josh Groban |
| 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 bones | Keith Richards |
| Do you know that our soul
is composed of harmony? | Leonardo DaVinci |
| All music is folk music: I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song | Louis Armstrong |
| Music is a higher revelation
than all wisdom and philosophy.
Music is the electrical soil
in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents | Ludwig van Beethoven |
| My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues | Mark Knopfler |
| Tunes help you breathe more easily | Mars Ltd |
| I’m not interested in heritage - this stuff is alive | Martin Carthy |
| Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances | Maya Angelou |
| Folk music has pretty powerful medicine for changing your heart | Paul Stookey |
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 Shelley |
| Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything | Plato |
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) |
| Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence | Robert Fripp |
| 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 blame. | Terry Pratchett (Wintersmith) |
Hark the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things | Tom Lehrer |
| Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent | Victor Hugo |
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) |
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) |
| It’s a folk singer’s job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable people | Woody Guthrie |
