Music and the Mind Quotes

“Art was important to the pessimistic Schopenhauer because the aesthetic mode of knowing, the pure contemplation of beauty, the tranquil appreciation of the Ideas, enabled the individual to escape, for the time being, from the never-ending misery of unsatisfied desire into a Nirvana of spiritual peace.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Charismatic individuals, such as Wagner, open the doors of our perceptions, transcend our limitations, and reveal mysteries unknown to us.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Music structures time. By imposing order, music ensures that the emotions aroused by a particular event peak at the same moment.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“What music expresses, is eternal, infinite and ideal; it does not express the passion, love, or longing of such-and-such an individual on such-and-such an occasion, but passion, love or longing in itself, and this it presents in that unlimited variety of motivations, which is the exclusive and particular characteristic of music, foreign and inexpressible to any other language.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Narcissists are bound to feel that their own death is the end of everything that really matters.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Participating in music, whether as performer or listener, brings us into contact with greatness, and leaves traces of that greatness as permanent impressions. I share Plato’s conviction that musical training is a potent instrument ‘because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul’.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“But listening to or participating in music can restore a person to himself, as the epigraph to this chapter suggests. People need to recapture what has been excluded during working hours: their subjectivity.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Thomas Mann wrote: A passion for Wagner’s enchanted oeuvre has been a part of my life ever since I first became aware of it and set out to make it my own, to invest it with understanding. What it has given me in terms of enjoyment and instruction I can never forget, nor the hours of deep and solitary happiness amidst the theatre throng, hours filled with frissons and delights for the nerves and the intellect alike, with sudden glimpses into things of profound and moving significance, such as only this art can afford.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“am sure that one of the reasons why music affects us deeply is its power to structure our auditory experience and thus to make sense out of it. Although I have been at pains to dispel the psychoanalytic view that music is an escape from reality or a regression to an infantile state, there is no doubt that music provides one path of temporary withdrawal from the hurly-burly of the external world.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Words alone are never enough to convey meaning: prosody is an essential feature of adult verbal exchanges. Consider the exclamation ‘Really!’ It can imply surprise, disbelief, disapproval, enthusiasm, disdain, and perhaps many other meanings, each of which must be conveyed by intonation rather than by the word itself.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Music is a temporal art. Its patterns exist in time and require duration for their development and completion. Although painting and architecture and sculpture make statements about relationships between space, objects, and colours, these relationships are static.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“What is universal is the human propensity to create order out of chaos.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Reading his account leaves one with the impression that being taken out of oneself, forgetting oneself as an individual, as he puts it, invariably leads to a contemplative state from which all passion is absent. In fact, he describes the aesthetic attitude as an objective frame of mind, as if stepping into another world, ‘where everything that moves our will, and thus violently agitates us, no longer exists’.20”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“For example, a man can look at a beautiful painting of a nude like the Rokeby Venus in two ways. He can see her as an object of desire, and perhaps experience some degree of sexual arousal. Or he can see her as an archetype of Woman, the essence of the feminine. The latter way of looking, in which personal interests and aims are temporarily discarded, is, according to Schopenhauer, the only way to appreciate art, and the only way, therefore, of obtaining a glimpse of the inner nature of the world. Schopenhauer calls this the ‘aesthetic way of knowing’. It is an exercise in empathy. Worringer expresses it thus: ‘We are delivered from our individual being as long as we are absorbed into an external object, an external form, with our inner urge to experience.’18”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“To appreciate art, the observer must adopt a special attitude of mind; the same attitude required by Plato, of detachment from personal concerns, so that the work of art can be appreciated in contemplative fashion uncontaminated by personal needs or preoccupations.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“they are often milestones on the journey toward”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“we may say that reading Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Tolstoy enriches our understanding of reality, and therefore enlarges our capacity to enjoy life and enhances our adaptation to it. Shakespeare, Keats, and the other great poets reveal the inner nature of the world and sharpen our sensibilities because their perceptions and their gift for metaphor make it possible for us to transcend our own limited vision by sharing theirs.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“We can let it have its way, or we can direct it to our will; we can force it into new paths, or we can rehearse familiar works; we can listen to it, or we can relegate it to our subconscious; but we can never get rid of it. For one so endowed – or so burdened – to live is to live music.25”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Another reason for annoyance is being unable to identify the music. I once spent a considerable period of time vainly searching through the scores of Haydn’s quartets, convinced that the tune which was preoccupying me was the slow movement of one of them. It turned out to be from his 88th Symphony, which I had not heard for a long time.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Magee’s explanation is Freudian. Tristan und Isolde presents the most overtly erotic music ever composed. Oedipal themes can be discerned in both Siegfried and Parsifal. Die Walküre has incest between brother and sister, Siegmund and Sieglinde, as one of its main themes. Siegfried’s beloved Brünnhilde was fathered by Wotan, his own grandfather, and is thus his aunt as well as his mistress. Magee suggests that some listeners dislike Wagner’s music because it arouses or puts them in touch with unconscious desires which they cannot accept and are compelled to repudiate.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Wagner’s music has the power to plumb new depths and uncover passions never before consciously experienced,”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“But no other composer, to my mind, has a greater capacity to dispel irritation or banish a mood of depression. There”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Getting to know a difficult piece of music is comparable with getting to know a person who does not immediately reveal him- or herself, or who may appear to erect barriers against intimacy.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Stravinsky’s ideal was to create works in which the personal dimension is eliminated, which is why Constant Lambert condemned his neoclassical work as inhuman and mechanical.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“The theory that composers embody their own feelings in a composition which then transmits those feelings direct to the listener was earlier dismissed as incomplete and unconvincing.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Are our encounters with music in any way comparable with encountering persons?”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Domestic music-making has declined in recent years; but those who still engage in it know that making music together is an irreplaceable way of achieving closeness. The members of a string quartet sometimes develop a special intimacy which they claim is unmatched by any other relationship.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Music can enable brain-damaged people to accomplish tasks which they could not master without its aid. It can also make life liveable for people who are emotionally disturbed or mentally ill. Because music is not so obviously necessary to most of us, we tend to underestimate its significance in the lives of normal people. Yet it is difficult to imagine a world without it. Even if playing music were forbidden, and every device for reproducing music destroyed, we should still have tunes running in our heads, still be using music to order our actions and make structured sense out of the world around us.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“Psychoanalysis is based on Freud’s theories of infantile development: it includes the idea that no one, however mature, entirely outgrows his or her infantile past.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

“The oddest consequence of Freud’s theory is its implication that, if total sexual fulfilment were possible by means of complete adaptation to reality, the arts, including music, would become otiose. I have discussed the unsatisfactory nature of this conclusion elsewhere.”
― Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind