10 poignant quotations about music by great writers

7 March 2024, 10:43 | Up to date: 7 March 2024, 21:58

In honour of World Guide Day, we’ve compiled a number of the most shifting quotations ever written about music by a number of the finest authors, poets and philosophers in historical past.

The hyperlink between music and literature is unmistakable, spanning centuries, canons and creators of every kind. Who higher, then, than the world’s biggest writers to try to obtain the not possible – describing the facility of music in phrases?

Learn extra: 7 of the best pieces of classical music for reading

1. Jane Austen

   

   British novelist Jane Austen penned this relatable quote in her 1815 novel Emma, spoken by ‘Mrs. Elton’. Austen herself was an achieved pianist, practising daily. Within the Regency interval, it was anticipated that each one refined younger women play the piano, and Austen was no exception. Music books have been costly, nonetheless, so Austen would typically copy out borrowed scores by hand, onto dominated pages in her diary. Austen’s ardour for music could be seen in her books, because it was fairly often a central matter in a lot of her novels.

2. Victor Hugo

   

   Victor Hugo, the French Romantic author and politician, was identified for being vocal about his love for music. There are a number of references to music in a lot of his most well-known novels, together with Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. A lot of his works have even impressed iconic works for the stage, together with Verdi’s opera Rigoletto – based mostly on Hugo’s play, Le roi s’amuse – in addition to the ultra-famous musicals, Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris.

3. Virginia Woolf

   

   Thought-about probably the most vital Twentieth-century authors, British author Virginia Woolf was considerably impacted by music. It instantly impressed her personal literary compositions, taking part in a central position in her work as a author. She even deliberate to jot down a e book detailing the affect of music on literature, however this purpose was, sadly, minimize brief by her loss of life in 1941. Maybe her most revealing comment was written in a letter to her buddy Elizabeth Trevelyan: “It is odd, for I’m not repeatedly musical, however I at all times consider my books as music earlier than I write them.”

4. Kurt Vonnegut

   

   American author Kurt Vonnegut, creator of Slaughterhouse-5, managed to seize the sensation many people have about music being the closest we as people can get to the divine. Your entire quote really reads, “If I ought to ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: ‘The one proof he wanted for the existence of God was music.’”

5. George Eliot

   

   Mary Ann Evans, identified by her pen identify George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet and one of many main writers of the Victorian period. Though she wrote seven novels, she is probably most well-known for her 1871 masterpiece, Middlemarch. This shifting quote comes from her 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss, and provides us some perception into her personal emotions on music. Eliot was really a talented pianist, who excelled in classes whereas attending faculty, and music remained vital to her all through her life.

6. Leo Tolstoy

   

   Russian author Leo Tolstoy made his love of music identified all through his life and in his many well-known works. Thought to be probably the most well-known and influential authors of all time, Tolstoy is finest identified for his two masterpieces, Struggle and Peace and Anna Karenina. However do you know that he additionally tried his hand at composition? He wrote only one musical work, titled ‘Waltz in F main’, when he was youthful and contemplating pursuing music as a occupation. Tolstoy’s private secretary, Nikolai Gusev, acknowledged in his memoirs that “for Tolstoy, music was not an amusement however an vital enterprise in life”, as Tolstoy was “a great musician and composer”.

7. Maya Angelou

   

   American author and poet Maya Angelou, most well-known for her inspirational writing and groundbreaking civil rights activism, was an avid music lover. Within the early Fifties – a decade earlier than she would publish her first piece of writing – she was an aspiring singer and dancer with a following within the nightclubs of San Francisco. Then writing took over her life, however the connection she felt to music, music and dance could be heard in her rhythmic, melodious poetry.

8. Henry David Thoreau

   

   Nineteenth-century American essayist, poet and thinker Henry David Thoreau championed the worth of music alongside his main transcendentalist values. Greatest identified for his e book Walden, which advocates simplifying life and connecting with nature, he wrote this in his journal, in an excerpt from an 1857 entry. He recognised the facility of music to offer solace, confidence and peace to those that pay attention, simply as nature so typically does.

9. Mary Oliver

   

   Much like her transcendentalist forefather Thoreau, American poet Mary Oliver was identified primarily for writing about her deep reference to nature. She, too, was an admirer of music, as evident on this citation of hers, which speaks to the unparalleled energy of music to specific what phrases and sentences by no means may.

10. Jack Kerouac

    

    The American novelist and poet who pioneered the Beat Era, Jack Kerouac, stated it most succinctly with this straight-forward, timeless quote. The creator of On the Street was famously influenced by jazz music in his poetry, even as soon as declaring, “I need to be thought of a jazz poet blowing an extended blues in a day jam session on Sunday.” The improvisatory, rhythmic and free nature of jazz within the Fifties appealed to Kerouac’s personal writing type and private values. He wasted no time attending to the guts of why all of us love and gravitate in direction of music – or, as he places it, “the one reality.”