The Musical Arts

Music, like all of culture, helps us to understand our environment, each other, and ourselves.

Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope…

When you sing in harmony, you change the way the entire song is sung. It becomes a new song, a different song. This is the song of the soul, and there is none more beautiful.

You are creative, whoever you are. Respect your own creativity and respect the creativity and creative space of other people.

Music makes an altar out of our ears. A single struck tone, a note blown from a flute, can flush the body with goodness.

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional…

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

A life in and with music can only be a life of humility, of giving one’s best to one’s fellow men.

A really musical soul is someone who has forgotten himself [herself] in music… The key to perfection is to be found in forgetting the self.

We have fallen into the place where everything is music… Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out.

Music expresses the harmony of the universe, while rituals express the order of the universe… Music rises to heaven, while rituals are patterned on the earth…

Like all music, the figured bass should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul…