Contemporary Music Quotes:

You know, I listen to contemporary music all the time

- Brian De Palma

source: Brian De Palma, Laurence F. Knapp (2003). “Interviews”, p.179, Univ. Press of Mississippi

topic: Contemporary, Contemporary Music

The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise.

- Kenny G

source: "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Nice, Adults, Jazz, Smooth Jazz, Contemporary Music

Do I think all contemporary Christian music is good? No.

- Amy Grant

topic: Christian, Thinking, Music Is, Christian Music, Contemporary Christian

My musical life started with hearing and being fascinated by contemporary music.

- Elliott Carter

topic: Musical Life, Hearing, Contemporary, Contemporary Music

We live in a modern world, and in contemporary music the central fact is contamination. Not the contamination of disease but the contamination of musical styles. If you find this in me, that is good.

- Ennio Morricone

topic: Musical, Style, World, Musical Style, Contamination

I was a regular kind of academic music student. I was at Juilliard. I had to study all the contemporary music of the time, and changing that language very radically was just a sign or a signal that I was going to try to do something very different. I find that that's what I feel closest to. I found no real inner response in me in a non-tonal language.

- Philip Glass

source: Source: thomasmoore.info

topic: Juilliard, Contemporary Music

Hip-Hop is bigger than the government.

- Erykah Badu

source: "Song: “The Healer”". 2008.

topic: Contemporary Music, Genres Of Music

The first thing that struck me about contemporary music in general had been thatthere was not much interest in rhythm.

- Elliott Carter

topic: Firsts, Interest, Rhythm, Contemporary Music

I don't know much about contemporary music. I do have an iPod but I listen to a lot of old blues. I listen to John Lee Hooker and Elmore James. I have been listening to them for years. I was obsessed with Van Morrison for years. I went to see him recently where he performed Astral Weeks. I just spent the entire night crying, but I was really obsessed with Van Morrison.

- Robert Pattinson

topic: Music, Night, Years, Contemporary Music

I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.

- John Cage

source: "Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music". Book by Richard Kostelanetz, 1952.

topic: Mean, Thinking, Ideas, Knowing More, Contemporary Music

The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of 'practice' events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure-but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary 'tools,' etc.

- Michael Merzenich

source: "Are we getting smarter or dumber?". Interview with Stefanie Olsen, www.cnet.com. September 21, 2005.

topic: Reading, Average, Years, Contemporary Music

I don't think anyone listening to my music needs any special knowledge. They don't need to have a background in contemporary music. They don't need to go to new-music concerts all the time in order to be able to understand it.

- Missy Mazzoli

topic: Thinking, Order, Listening, Contemporary Music

Obviously there are pieces of classical music that are some of the most beautiful music ever written, for me anyway is a lot of classical or contemporary music, so it's a different kind of space that you enter when you're listening to it.

- Bryce Dessner

topic: Beautiful, Space, Listening, Contemporary Music, Beautiful Music

One of the central flaws in the state of contemporary music is that the major record companies have failed to incorporate that simple fact into their business plans. They've come into an industry that's based on idiosyncratic artists and tried to erase every idiosyncratic aspect out of it.

- Moby

source: "David Bowie EW Cover: Inside David Bowie and Moby's out-of-this-world 2002 tour". Interview with Jeff Gordinier, ew.com. January 11, 2016.

topic: Artist, Simple, Records, Contemporary Music

I have always personally preferred to think of what is more difficult for my instrument, and not what is the most natural or the easiest. I enjoy the challenges - especially those that come with composers who have written contemporary music for the recorder.

- Michala Petri

topic: Thinking, Challenges, Natural, Recorders, Contemporary Music

In contemporary music, the challenge for me is to make the recorder sound as naturally expressive as, for example, the violin - without doing it too much and forcing the instrument. It is very easy to be overly expressive on the recorder, and finding the balance is quite difficult.

- Michala Petri

topic: Challenges, Balance, Too Much, Recorders, Contemporary Music

The musical culture in the United States has no doubt suffered severe setbacks, especially in funding, since the early 2000's. However, I've been amazed at the resiliency of those involved with contemporary music in this country. I think composers and those dedicated to contemporary music have reacted with tremendous creativity and resourcefulness.

- Michael Hersch

topic: Country, Creativity, Thinking, Resiliency, Resourcefulness

It was a staggering moment when I first heard the news. Lennon was a most talented man and above all, a gentle soul. John and his colleagues set a high standard by which contemporary music continues to be measured.

- Frank Sinatra

topic: Contemporary Music

My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.

- Anthony Braxton

topic: Jazz, Concerned, Contemporary, Marginalized, Contemporary Music

I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.

- Billy Childish

topic: Rocks, Blue, Years, Blue Jeans, Contemporary Music

My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.

- Sara Zarr

topic: Growing Up, Father, School, Contemporary Music

My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.

- Patti LuPone

topic: Rocks, Stories, Mahler, Contemporary Music, Classic Rock

Morley is one of the outstanding voices of her generation, as a singer, songwriter and bandleader she's in a class of her own, transcends all categories and is making a major contribution to contemporary music.

- David Amram

topic: Class, Voice, Generations, Contemporary Music

I've always loved the blues, ever since I was a kid. It has a depth to it that a lot of contemporary music doesn't have. It has pain and suffering in it, but funny stories, too. And it is built on storytelling, which is something I really love.

- Nickolas Ashford

topic: Pain, Kids, Suffering, Funny Story, Contemporary Music

My mother was a classical pianist and my stepfather was an industrialist who was passionate about composing contemporary music.

- Carla Bruni

topic: Mother, Passionate, Stepfathers, Contemporary Music