I don't know how long it has been since my ear has been free from the roll of a drum. It is the music I sleep by, and I love it....... I shall remain here while anyone remains, and do whatever comes to my hand. I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As I define it, rock & roll is dead. The attitude isn't dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn't have the same meaning. ...The attitude, though, is still very much alive--and it still informs other kinds of music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compare the history of the novel to that of rock 'n' roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splint...ered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like the international avant-garde, rock-and-roll is the creative product of a rebellious youth culture trying to reach a mass aud...ience. Its artists embrace technological innovation. Their lives and personal styles are often counterculture. Many rock groups have appropriated creative strategies of modern art history: Some stage acts can be seen as Neo-Dada performance, others have lifted ideas from the Surrealists, the Situationists, and other art groups. Although pop music has its individual stars like Elvis and Madonna, most rock musicians, like the international avant-garde, work collaboratively, in bands. But however much a rock-and-roll group may initially appeal to a specific youth subculture, its potential for vast global audiences is different from that of fine art, which remains within the arcane reaches of high culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known--it was used pri...marily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is "the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy's pony."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact... that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If music and sweet poetry agree, As they must needs (the sister and the brother),... Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me, Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »