The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation..

Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount….

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their idea….

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass..

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more..

The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when ….

Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound..

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough..

It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right..

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there..

There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same exp….

The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins..

The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this….

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men..

Have we not all about us forms of a musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?..

Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them..

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it..

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music..

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation..

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog..