Quotes About Harmony In Music

“Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

“You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life ... when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings ... when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors ... when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats ...”

— Wilhelm Reich

“Music is a mixed mathematical science that concerns the origens, attributes, and distinctions of sound, out of which a cultivated and lovely melody and harmony are made, so that God is honored and praised but mankind is moved to devotion, virtue, joy, and sorrow.”

— Christoph Wolff

“The dream world of sleep and the dream world of music are not far apart. I often catch glimpses of one as I pass through a door to the other, like encountering a neighbor in the hallway going into the apartment next to one's own. In the recording studio, I would often lie down to nap and wake up with harmony parts fully formed in my mind, ready to be recorded. I think of music as dreaming in sound.”

— Linda Ronstadt

“Chords reel and the mind reels,
and for all I know
The minds of the Gods reel as well
For if the Gods have minds
They must be attuned to music and to harmony.
Harmony is but the pulse of Chaos
And to such pulsation
Even stones resound.”

— Tobeimean Peter

“Taylor Durham was in a gay man's heaven, with all those tight bodies swaying back and forth to the music. Grinding together in harmony.”

— Shakuita Johnson

“Yoga is like music: the rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life.”

— B.K.S. Iyengar

“Music burst through him, perfect notes he hear rarely. Fire and ice, wind and calm, sky and earth, water and rock all fused together. Joley seemed as wild and turbulent s the sea, yet beneath her fiery passion, at the very core of her, she was as forceful and strong and as constant as the deepest ocean currents. Ilya seemed as calm as a windless sea, yet beneath the surface smoldered a volcano of such explosive magnitude, his power could easily sweep everything from his path. Together they completed each other, his melody and hers merging together into a single, perfect harmony.”

— Christine Feehan

“In this Music [the singing of the angels in harmony] the World was begun; for Iluvatar made visible the song of the Ainur,and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

“I finally found him sitting on his balcony. He was leaning back against the wall with his eyes closed. Soft music played, and a cool ocean breeze blew back my hair as I stepped on to the balcony and inhaled the scent of the sea.
"May I join you?" I asked softly.
He didn't bother opening his eyes. "If you like."
The moon in the dark sky looked like a giant white plate dipping its edge into the ocean. We sat quietly for a while. I closed my eyes too and listened to him hum along in harmony with the music.
"You haven't played your guitar in a long time. I miss it," I said when the song was finished.
Ren turned away. "I fear there is no music left in me.”

— Colleen Houck

“Food is one part of the experience. And it has to be somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the dining experience. But the rest counts as well: The mood, the atmosphere, the music, the feeling, the design, the harmony between what you have on the plate and what surrounds the plate.”

— Alain Ducasse

“Of all the conceptions of pure bliss that people and poets have dreamed of, listening to the harmony of the spheres always seemed to me the highest and most intense. That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged - to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious innate harmony. Alas, how is it that life can be so confusing and out of tune and false, how can there be lies, evil, envy and hate among people, when the shortest song and most simple piece of music preach that heaven is revealed in the purity, harmony and interplay of clearly sounded notes. And how can I upbraid people and grow angry when I myself, with all the good will in the world have been unable to make song and sweet music out of my life?”

— Hermann Hesse

“O music! A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly only; you steep your being in it; it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time it lives in you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse, and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you, it makes burdens light and gives wings to depressed spirits. The melody of a folk song can do that. And first of all harmony! For each harmonious chord of pure-toned notes - those of church bells, for example - fills the spirit with grace and delight, a feeling that is intensified by every additional note; and at times this can enchant the heart and make it tremble with bliss as no other sensual pleasure can.”

— Hermann Hesse

“Music is more powerful than reason in the soul. That is also why Plato made music the very first step in his long educational curriculum: good music was to create the harmony of soul that would be a ripe field for the higher harmony of reason to take root in later. And that is also why he said that the decay of the ideal state would begin with a decay in music. In fact, one of your obscure modern scholars has shown that social and political revolutions have usually been preceded by musical revolutions, and why another sage said, 'Let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws.”

— Peter Kreeft

“When we feel, a kind of lyric is sung in our heart.
When we think, a kind of music is played in our mind.
In harmony, both create a beautiful symphony of life.”

— Toba Beta

“Perspective in art has receded along with harmony in music: We tend more and more to see the world as a heap of intrinsically meaningless fragments.”

— Iain McGilchrist

“Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!”

— Christian Scott

“I may be helping to bring harmony between people through my music.”

— Nat King Cole

“There was something vampiric about. music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who don't believe in the supernatural ... the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, this music.”

— Anne Rice

“I learned to play by ear before I learned music theory. For me, that makes sense. After all, children learn to speak before they read and write. The more you understand of music - how harmony and time signatures work, and what chords and inversions are - the more you'll enjoy it.”

— Jools Holland

“To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath.”

— Pico Iyer

“From the beginning, I've always had a knack for catchy melodies. But I went through a period when I was trying to be rock n' roll and have a rock n' roll attitude. I was fighting my nature by trying to play really hard and sing really hard. But at a certain point, I realized that I loved syrupy pop music with tons of harmony.”

— Juliana Hatfield

“Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.”

— Charles Hazlewood

“I'm a chameleon. I can change my voice a lot. I always was able to, because in my family's music, I was a harmony singer, and harmony singing is really hard.”

— Linda Ronstadt

“And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar ...
... Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty?”

— Plato

“Wagner exploited all forms of expression at a composer's disposal - harmony, dynamics, orchestration - to the extreme. His music is highly emotional, and at the same time Wagner has extraordinary control over the effect he achieves.”

— Daniel Barenboim

“If you and I shall, like the believing shepherds, watch and long for His appearing, one day we, too, shall hear a music grander and sweeter even than the song of angels, when the great Composer shall transpose all the strains of earth from the minor into the major, when the wail of nature shall give way to the glad harmony of the everlasting jubilee.”

— Abbott Eliot Kittredge

“The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine ... Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

— Ada Lovelace

“Now they are a circle, and they vibrate together, they pulsate together. Their hearts are no longer separate, their beats are no longer separate, they have become a melody, a harmony. It is the greatest music possible, all other musics are just faint things compared to it, shadow things compared to it.”

— Osho

“When people listen to my music, I hope that they will notice that if you take a piece by a composer like Schubert, the major and the minor triad is an extermely important thing not merely as harmony, but in creating melodic lines. Schubert is always walking up and down with arpeggios on C, E, G and so forth. I am not doing anything different really, except using a different system of harmony.”

— Elliott Carter

“I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony.”

— Mahan Esfahani

“A man in Mali told me that there are seven senses. Everyone has five, some can use their sixth. But not everyone has the seventh. It is the power to heal with music, calm with color, to soothe the sick soul with harmony. He told me that I have this gift, and I know what I have to do with it.”

— Marie Daulne

“Diatonic, he heard the word in his head. Chromatic, pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic, each iteration of the scale opening innumerable possibilities for harmony. He thought about the Pythagorean major third, the Didymus comma, the way the intervals sound out of tune rather than as though they were different notes. This, he thought, was where his brilliance at mathematics bled into his love of music; music was the realm in which his mathematical brain danced.”

— Ru Freeman

“What I remember best from those times is the music itself. When it succeded, we took hold of the audience's attention, working it from a distracted, unshaped mass into spun beauty, passing the fine strands back and forth until we wove together something grander, not only music but memory, too-the particulars of past and present, stretched taut across a loom of timeless ideals. Harmony. Symmetry. Order.”

— Andromeda Romano-Lax

“Each individual composes the music of his own life. If he injures another, he brings disharmony. When his sphere is disturbed, he is disturbed himself, and there is a discord in the melody of his life. If he can quicken the feeling of another to joy or to gratitude, by that much he adds to his own life; he becomes himself by that much more alive. Whether conscious of it or not, his thought is affected for the better by the joy or gratitude of another, and his power and vitality increase thereby, and the music of his life grows more in harmony.”

— Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Music is expression of harmony in sound. Love is the expression of harmony in life ...”

— Stephen Gaskin

“Decorating is like music. Harmony is what we constantly strive for. At home, we want a peaceful atmosphere where the objects are the notes and nothing is off-key.”

— Charlotte Moss

“In the etheric body are centered the forces animating man's physical vehicle, so disease is evidenced in the etheric before it manifests in the physical. The etheric, composed of finer, more attenuated substances than the physical, is corresponding amenable to vibratory influences. It is upon the former that harmony and rhythm have the most potent effect. Good music readjusts its molecular structure in accordance with the original divine plan, the archetype, and refines and accentuates it's vibratory currents. All forms of beauty and harmony increase this regenerating process.”

— Corinne Heline

“By harmony all phenomena are formed and sustained. There is a scientific statement to the effect that this earth is a vast harmonic wave system that is built and sustained by unheard music.”

— Corinne Heline

“I am very pleased to be involved with the Daniel Pearl Music Days committee because its message resonates with me on a very personal level, My own career is an example of the universal power of music, especially the power of Hip Hop, to bring people of different backgrounds together for a common purpose. I hope that my commitment to the Daniel Pearl Music Days committee will encourage all music lovers - both amateurs and professionals - to get involved with the Music Days performance network and contribute to the 'Harmony For Humanity' e-Stage.”

— Russell Simmons

“Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But it is really God - playing music in his favourite cathedral in heaven - shattering stained glass - playing a gigantic organ - thundering on the keys - perfect harmony - perfect joy.”

— Joan Baez

“All the same, the fundamental truths which govern that art are still unchangeable; just as the principles of mechanics must always govern architecture, whether the building be made of wood, stone, iron or concrete; just as the principles of harmony govern music of whatever kind. It is still necessary, then, to establish the principles of war.”

— Ferdinand Foch

“When we live apart from God, our lives get out of tune - out of harmony with others and with God. But if we live in tune with the Master, we, too, will find ourselves surrounded by His beautiful music. As this new year begins, ask God to help you tune your life every day to His Word, so you can bring harmony and joy to those around you.”

— Billy Graham

“Aristotle ... imputed this symphony of the heavens ... this music of the spheres to Pythagorus ... But Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony ... If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras' was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars.”

— John Milton

“I have found in every word a certain musical value, a melody in every thought, harmony in every feeling, and I have tried to interpret the same things with clear and simple words to those who used to listen to my music.”

— Hazrat Inayat Khan

“What we call music in our everyday language is only a miniature, which our intelligence has grasped from that music or harmony of the whole universe which is working behind everything, and which is the source and origin of nature. It is because of this that the wise of all ages have considered music to be a sacred art. For in music the seer can see the picture of the whole universe; and the wise can interpret the secret and nature of the working of the whole universe in the realm of music.”

— Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society.”

— William Wordsworth

“There can be no Swaraj where there is no harmony, no music.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes.”

— Yoko Ono

“The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated? ... We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal ... I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things I've been through are serious ... The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music.”

— Robert Plant