Chord Quotes - page 4

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn. (Naomi Shihab Nye)

Trust me, the only real way to understand 'Chic' is in highfalutin terms. Our chord progressions were based on European modal melodies. I made those early 'Chic' records to impress my jazz friends.

Nile Rodgers

I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.

Richard Rodney Bennett

The third note in a chord is what depicts whether it's major or minor. Rhythm and Blues hardly ever uses it because it means that the melody is free to move between major and minor because you're not clashing with the third being depicted one way or the other.

Robert Palmer

I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it. I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used. I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing.

Charlie Parker

The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the sonority in different ways.

Charles Rosen

One of the pupils of Artur Schnabel told me that he never heard his teacher practice a difficult passage slowly, but he was struck by the way Schnabel would play one chord of a slow movement over and over, measuring and remeasuring the different components of the harmony.

Charles Rosen

Here, in the last pages of the "Abegg" Variations, Schumann plays the motto theme A-B-E-G-G (B in German notation is the English Bb) not by sounding the last four notes but by taking them away, one by one, from, the chord of Bb-E-G. This is the first time in history that a melody is signified not by the attack but by the release of a series of notes. The motto, however, ends with a repeated final G. If the motto is played by releasing each successive note, we are faced with a paradox: when the G is released once on the piano, it is no longer there to be released again-the motto is not only unplayable as conceived but unimaginable. Schumann signifies as much by another paradox: he adds accents to the sustained notes.

Charles Rosen

Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you?

Leonard Cohen

Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

Leonard Cohen

Normally writers do not talk much, because they are saving their conversations for the readers of their book-
those invisible listeners with whom we wish to strike a sympathetic chord. (Ruskin Bond)

Punk's an attitude. Punk's not three-chord rock. If you want to listen to three chord rock, there's southern rock.

Jack Terricloth

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Statues but known from shapes of the earth, By being too lovely for mortal birth; Paintings whose colours of life were caught From the fairy tints in the rainbow wrought; Music whose sighs had a spell like those That float on the sea at the evening's close Language so silvery, that every word Was like the lute's awakening chord.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.

Lou Reed

It's very much a piece of myself when I write a song. I don't mean to say it's very personal, like the lyrics mean something personal to me. When I write a song, that's my taste in music - my taste in chord progressions and melodies.

Zooey Deschanel

All of our songs take these really big creative turns and twists throughout the process, so sometimes songs will start out as a melody or some musical chord progressions.

Chester Bennington

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

Tori Amos

I definitely don't see myself as much of a singer, because my upbringing is really based around the guitar, learning chord progressions and that sort of thing. So the singing aspect of what I do has been a secondary adventure.

M. Ward

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

Joni Mitchell

The achievement of such a change of register through a sequential progression is a familiar procedure in the music of the "common practice." The significant distinction is that where Berg subdivides the registral span into equal, i. e., cyclic, intervals, his tonal predecessors subdivide it, in changing register through sequential transference, into the unequal intervals of the diatonic scale. As I pointed out in my last lecture, however, the qualitative transformation in the language of music which we have experienced in our century has a long prehistory. Beginning with Schubert, we occasionally find normal diatonic functions questioned in changes of key that progress along the intervals of the whole-tone scale, or the diminished-7th chord, or the augmented triad. An even more radical example of a cyclic progression in a tonal composition is...from Wagner. (George Perle)

I thrive on change. That's probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They'll be going along on one key and I'll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that's how my life is.

Joni Mitchell

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates

I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches. Have you ever heard the earth breathe?

Kate Chopin

I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.

Joanna Newsom

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