When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.
Interpretation
Producing an album involves careful planning and structure, enhancing the listener's experience.
In this quote, Quincy Jones emphasizes the importance of treating album production as a theatrical experience. An album should be constructed with intentionality and artistry, ensuring that each element resonates with the listener, as the human ear naturally appreciates well-structured arrangements.
In practice
In a presentation on music production, I might quote Quincy Jones to highlight the importance of structure.
Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.
You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.
I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.
I think the attraction of 'American Idol' is about the basic human nature attitude that is, 'We can put you up there. But we can take you down.'
I believe in the nobility of entertaining people and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours of their busy lives.
A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.
Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it; it's a pleasure to make a living that way. Then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits.
A puppet, for example, is just a piece of wood, a couple of rivets, but put them together, and if you know how to do it, and the audience's imagination joins in with this, then a miracle will come out of that machine. That is what we and the audience do in the theatre - we create miracles in that space.
To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.
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