Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
   -- Richard Strauss

   I write (music) as a sow piddles.
   -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

   My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.
   -- Cole Porter

   Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already.
   -- Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped
   to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

   I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming
   pool than play Bach and starve.
   -- Xavier Cugat

   (Musicians) talk of nothing but money and jobs.  Give me businessmen
   every time.  They really are interested in music and art.
   -- Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited
   musicians to his home.

   The amount of money one needs is terrifying...
   -- Ludwig van Beethoven

   Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other
   way you can make a living.
   -- Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer.

   Chaos is a friend of mine.
   -- Bob Dylan

   There is nothing more difficult than talking about music.
   -- Camille Saint-Saens

   I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come
   crawling to my feet.
   -- Niccolo Paganini

   Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise
   you sleep all day.
   -- Ringo Starr

   What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?
   -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought
   two or three seats.
   -- Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan.

   If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's
   conversation.
   -- Oscar Wilde

   Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
   --Mel Brooks

   Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all
   the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.
   -- William F. Buckley, Jr.

   You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's
   Seventh and go slow.
   -- Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.

   Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
   -- Mark Twain

   I love Beethoven, especially the poems.
   -- Ringo Starr

   Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.
   -- James Gibbons Hunekar

   If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like
   that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder.
   -- Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland.

   There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.
   -- Sergei Prokofiev

   I never use a score when conducting my orchestra...  Does a lion tamer
   enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
   -- Dimitri Mitropolous

   God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
   -- Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player.

   Already too loud!
   -- Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra,
   on seeing the players reaching for their instruments.

   I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than
   Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.
   -- Frederic Chopin

   When she started to play, Steinway himself came down
   personally and rubbed his name off the piano.
   -- Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller.

   In opera, there is always too much singing.
   -- Claude Debussy

   An exotic and irrational entertainment.
   -- Samuel Johnson's definition of opera.

   If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.
   -- Pierre Beaumarchais

   The Barber of Seville Opera is where a guy gets stabbed
   in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
   -- Robert Benchley

   I'd hate this to get out, but I really like opera.
   -- Ford Frick

   Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if
   there were no singers!
   -- Gioacchino Rossini

   Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica.
   -- Sir Thomas Beecham

   I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in
   the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.
   -- Bing Crosby

   Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless
   brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the
   indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though closely
   rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually
   surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method.
   (Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding
   between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.)
   -- Glenn Gould

   It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some
   kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of
   undifferentiated weirdness.
   -- Jerry Garcia

   A ponderous orchestral absurdity.
   -- Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the
   Los Angeles Philharmonic.

BOB FLETCHER
Drafting-Archives Unit
US ARMY CORPS of ENGINEERS