Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician
Interpretation
This quote highlights the relationship between musicians and their audience, emphasizing that the musician is the first to experience their own music.
Wynton Marsalis's quote reflects the intrinsic bond between musicians and their art, suggesting that while music is ultimately created for an audience, the musician themselves engages with and appreciates the music first. This establishes a unique intimacy with the work, where the emotions and intentions of the musician profoundly shape the experience for future listeners.
In practice
During a music workshop, one could use this quote to inspire aspiring musicians to connect with their craft.
Swing is extreme coordination. It's a maintaining balance, equilibrium. It's about executing very difficult rhythms with a panache and a feeling in the context of very strict time. So, everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.
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My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.
The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.
I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.
Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.
Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Bright-eyed Fancy, hov'ring o'er, Scatters from her pictured urn Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.
The cool thing about dope black style becoming in style is that the industry has no choice but to try and reduplicate that.
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