| The truest expression of a people
is in its dance and music | Agnes de Mile | 20/03/2018 |
| 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 pressure | Albert Einstein | 07/06/2020 |
| After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music | Aldous Huxley | 06/03/2018 |
| I love all those great F-words – feminism, folk music… | Ani DiFranco | 20/06/2021 |
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 Eddington | 22/11/2022 |
| Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life | Berthold Auerbach | 06/03/2018 |
| One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain | Bob Marley | 06/03/2018 |
| Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without | Confucius | 06/03/2018 |
| You can do anything to music – it doesn’t mind | Dave Swarbrick | 21/03/2018 |
| He had a bike and he got about a bit | Dave Swarbrick on lusty Scottish fiddler Scott Skinner | 03/11/2022 |
| After a tune is played, the notes just float away – there’s nothing to tidy up | David Phillpot | 21/03/2018 |
| 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 universe | Douglas Adams | 06/03/2018 |
| Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies | Edward Bulwer-Lytton | 07/06/2020 |
| Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid | Frank Zappa | 07/06/2020 |
| Without music, life would be a mistake | Friedrich Nietzsche | 06/03/2018 |
| Folk music is the original melody of man; it is the musical mirror of the world | Friedrich Nietzsche | 20/06/2021 |
| There is no feeling,
except the extremes of fear and grief,
that does not find relief in music | George Eliot | 20/03/2018 |
| Where words fail, music speaks | Hans Christian Andersen | 31/07/2019 |
| The only truth is music | Jack Kerouac | 06/03/2018 |
| Without music, life would be a blank to me | Jane Austen | 06/03/2018 |
| When the music’s over, turn out the lights | Jim 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 music | John 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 it | John Spiers | 04/11/2022 |
| 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 myth | Josh Groban | 15/06/2018 |
| 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 | 06/03/2018 |
| Do you know that our soul
is composed of harmony? | Leonardo DaVinci | 20/03/2018 |
| If it was never new and it never gets old then it’s a folk song | Llewyn Davis | 20/06/2021 |
| All music is folk music: I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song | Louis Armstrong | 06/03/2018 |
| 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 | 20/03/2018 |
| My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues | Mark Knopfler | 06/03/2018 |
| Tunes help you breathe more easily | Mars Ltd | 25/08/2018 |
| I’m not interested in heritage – this stuff is alive | Martin Carthy | 20/03/2018 |
| I was involved in the Great Folk Music scare back in the sixties, when it almost caught on | Martin Mull | 20/06/2021 |
| Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances | Maya Angelou | 31/07/2019 |
| Folk music has pretty powerful medicine for changing your heart | Paul Stookey | 06/03/2018 |
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 Shelley | 30/07/2019 |
| The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be | Pete Seeger | 12/01/2023 |
| Life without music would be like a human being without sense | Pharrell Williams | 12/01/2023 |
| Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything | Plato | 06/03/2018 |
| The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles | Ralph Waldo Emerson | 22/11/2022 |
| If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together | Richard 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 silence | Robert Fripp | 06/03/2018 |
| In Shetland they have more fiddles per head than anywhere else on earth… so they’re never short of firewood | Simon Nicol | 06/11/2022 |
| There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard | Sun Tzu (what would he have made of Gweilos’ trixy 7-note scales?) | 12/01/2023 |
| But this didn’t feel like magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt like music | Terry 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 blame | Terry Pratchett (Wintersmith) | 06/06/2020 |
Hark the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things | Tom Lehrer | 06/03/2018 |
| I know only two tunes: one of them is Yankee Doodle, and the other isn’t | Ulysses S Grant | 22/11/2022 |
| If music is a place then jazz is the city, folk is the wilderness, rock is the road, classical is a temple | Vera Nazarin | 12/01/2023 |
| Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent | Victor Hugo | 06/03/2018 |
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 people | Woody Guthrie | 06/03/2018 |
