Music . . . began with man, primitive man, trying to duplicate Nature's sounds -- winds, birds, animals, water, the crescendo of fire -- after which great systems of learning were set up, only to discover that music is limitless.

-- Duke Ellington

 

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

-- Rebecca West

 

Music is the only religion that really delivers the goods.

-- Frank Zappa

 

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that reemerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh.  A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me. 

-- Jean Genet