A Quote by Carson McCullers

It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright. — © Carson McCullers
It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
To me, soul music is anything that is made from the heart, and therefore moves the listener; it's not overly self-aware, and leaves room for the listener to make their own conclusions.
I have this ideal listener, as John Cage did. This listener doesn't bring expectations that my music will fit into some part of music history, or that it will do any particular thing. This listener is just open to listening.
I'm hoping to knock down the walls and broaden the lane a little bit more for music that's pop music at the heart of it.
There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
Music should be demanding for the listener. You can gain more out of it that way. I always try to leave space in the music for the listener to have their own experience of it, so it's not bombarded with only one meaning.
I didn't necessarily grow up with country being my first priority as a music listener. I grew up listening to classic rock and Christian music.
The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.
poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development.
Even the heart in time may grow cold.
Many couples permit their marriages to become stale and their love to grow cold like old bread or worn-out jokes or cold gravy. These people will do well to reevaluate, to renew their courting, to express their affection, to acknowledge kindness, and to increase their consideration so their marriage again can become beautiful, sweet, and growing. While marriage is difficult, and discordant and frustrated marriages are common, yet real, lasting happiness is possible, and marriage can be more an exultant ecstasy than the human mind can conceive.
Surely the hold of great music on the listener is precisely this: that the listener is made whole; and at the same time part of an image of infinite grace and grandeur which is creation.
Hobgoblins know the proper way to dance: Arms akimbo, loopy legs askew, Leaping into darkness with delight, Lusting for the ecstasy of fright, Open to the charm of horrors new.
I'm not sure it's a better music world of appreciation and performance. I think the listener is a different guy, and listening is something he does in passing, with other stuff going on. There's less care and understanding of the relationship between the song and the listener.
Have you got a local mind? Broaden it! Have you got an international mind? Broaden it! Have you got a universal mind? It is not enough, because there are other universes. Broaden it! Broaden your mind till you get a multi-universal mind! And yet, this is not enough too! Broaden it! Leave your village; leave your city; leave your country; leave the earth; leave the universe; leave all the universes! Don't let your mind to cast anchor in any port! Narrow mind is the greatest enemy of the truth! The best mind is the one which has no frontiers!
Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment – and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.
When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.
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