A Quote by Sergei Prokofiev

Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing.

Sergei Prokofiev

Quote Topics

First Hearing Music People Understand

Quote Author

Sergei Prokofiev
Russian - Composer
April 23, 1891 - March 5, 1953

Anybody who'd expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It's so antithetical to being a musician.

Jeff Tweedy

What a lot of people don't understand is that the music that they're hearing is usually months, and in some cases, years old. So I'm a lot better than whatever material people have been hearing.

JD Era

I did not like that name "world music" in the beginning. I think that African music must get more respect than to be put in a ghetto like that. We have something to give to others. When you look to how African music is built, when you understand this kind of music, you can understand that a lot of all this modern music that you are hearing in the world has similarities to African music. It's like the origin of a lot of kinds of music.

Baaba Maal

I'm a fan of all music, and probably my first - well, not the very first music I listened to, but back in the late fifties, when I first started hearing rock & roll, it was definitely tinged with doo wop and also Elvis and all those great songs.

Timothy B. Schmit

I suppose in our culture - in our lifetime - we've always enjoyed people who tell it straight. We like our presidents, our comedians, and our actors to do that . . . It's funny. You say that people prefer a tasteful formalism - as opposed to an oppressive formalism - but I do feel very strongly that form follows function.

Oliver Stone

I realized a lot of my friends were going to nightclubs and listening to house music. I was hanging out with them and going to clubs as well but I didn't really understand that kind of music. I was listening to country music and was heavily into Hank Williams, bluegrass, and Bob Dylan. So I just decided I really needed to understand what this music I was hearing in the clubs was all about.

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm

I've always believed in good music over bad music. I believe in two sorts of musics. And the lines that separate us, I don't believe in that. That's for people who need to easily define what they're hearing. Me, I'm cool with everything and anything I'm hearing that's music. It comes under one definition for me.

Jay-Z

Bjork has this kind of abstraction and formalism that you associate with art music or avant-garde music.

David Longstreth

I do remember one of the first great experiences of going to Europe was playing in Rome hearing the people sing our music so loud. It was louder than the music we were playing.

John Petrucci

Technology is improving to prevent musicians from losing their hearing while performing on stage... audience members losing their hearing from listening to loud music... people being able to experience music not just with their ears, but with touch or with through their eyes.

Mandy Harvey

Being at the show, watching people do what they do so well, hearing a full orchestra, and hearing beautiful music? There's nothing better.

Colin Donnell

It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let's just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears.

Howard Jacobson

For some young people, their first experience ever hearing punk rock music was playing the Green Bay Packers on 'Madden'.

Billie Joe Armstrong

My father is a violinist and my mother is a pianist, so I've been hearing music all my life. I started playing at three and had my first music teacher at five.

Michala Petri

... the hardest studio music to play is Tom & Jerry - cartoons. The music makes absolutely no sense, as music. You can't get into hearing it. There's nothing to hear-'bleep!, blop! scratch!' and it comes fast; everything's first take. That'll change the way you look at life.