Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes
The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.
Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.
But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.
I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.
The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.
I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.
Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.
To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.
The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.
The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.
Have we not all about us forms of a musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?.
Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?
Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.