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 didn't know I was a zombie pedant until I started considering what from the zombie canon to keep in 'Zone One' and what to ignore.
The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names.
I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.
I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
I've always felt like I was an actor for hire. And almost apologetic for being a woman of color, trying to stifle that voice. But I don't feel that way in Shondaland. I feel like I am accepted into a world where I'm a part of the narrative - I'm a part of it.
It is in order to really see, to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call 'The Ten Thousand Things' around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world. I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.
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