You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
Interpretation
Melodies are a divine inspiration that cannot be fully learned through study alone.
In this quote, Quincy Jones emphasizes the importance of innate talent and divine inspiration in music creation. While technical skills such as orchestration and harmony can be studied and mastered, the essence of melody, which is often seen as the heart of music, is something that transcends academic learning and comes from a higher source, reflecting the spiritual nature of art.
In practice
A composer might use this quote during a masterclass to inspire students about the essence of creating melodies.
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.
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.
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 took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting... Drawing contains everything, except the hue
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.
My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.
My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'
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