What book are you reading?

I picked up this little booklet (just 50 pages) the other day. Couldn't pass it up. It cost only two bucks at the Newberry gift shop/book store. (Which apparently has some connection with Hyde Park's excellent Seminary Co-Op Bookstore).

It's title is, simply, Music - A Book of Quotations. Basically, that says it all. Some citations are high minded, others just silly, a few biting in their criticism. More than a few quite ironic. Then there's the poetic. But all are awful fun. Here, let me share a few:

"Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life."
~ Beethoven

"How nice the human voice is when it isn't singing."
~ Rudolph Bing

"You can either have The Resurrection or you can have Liberace. But you can't have both."
~Liberace

"Music is a strange bird singing the songs of another shore."
~ J.G. Holland

"Perhaps it was because Nero played the fiddle they burned Rome."
~Oliver Herford

"Rock 'n roll music is for adolescents. It's a dead end."
~ Mick Jagger

"I don't give a damn about the Missouri Waltz but I can't say it out loud because it's the song of Missouri. It's as bad as the Star Spangled Banner so far as music is concerned."
~ Harry S. Truman

"I dreamt all this: never could my poor head have invented such a thing purposefully."
~ Richard Wagner

"Good music is wine turned to sound."
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"If one hears bad music, it's one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."
~ Oscar Wilde

"Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best."
~ Oscar Wilde

"The plaintive sound of saxophones moaning softly like a man who has sjust missed a short putt."
~ P.C. Wodehouse

"Bop is just Stravinsky played on an empty stomach."
~ Florian Zabach, violinist

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another."
~ Frank Zappa