Rapper El-P Samples Tom Sawyer

See Also: SINGING

1. As music takes up the thread that language drops, so it is where Shakespeare ends that Beethoven began —Sidney Lanier
2. The band wound up the tune like a train rushing into a station —Donald McCaig
3. The cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful —Pablo Casals
4. Composing is like making love to the future —Lukas Foss
5. Composing is like organizing a meal. The different dishes must be so arranged as to rouse the appetite and renew the pleasure with each course —Moses Ibn Ezra
6. A concert is like a bullfight, the moment of truth —Artur Rubinstein
7. The conductor … flapped his arms like a rooster about to crow —Katherine Mansfield
8. Each musician looks like mumps from blowing umpah umpah umps —Ogden Nash
9. Fiddles tuning up like cats in pain —Harvey Swados
10. Good music, like land and machines, had no people in sight —Will Weaver

    In Weaver’s novel, Red Earth, White Earth, this simile is used to explain a character’s liking for music.

11. A great burst of music gushed up like a geyser —Mary Lavin
12. In came a fiddler, and tuned like fifty stomach aches —Charles Dickens
13. In music as in love, pleasure is the waste product of creation —Igor Stravinsky
14. It is like eating vanilla ice cream in Paradise, listening to beautiful music —Camille Lemmonnier
15. Musical as the holes of a flute without the flute —O. Henry
16. Music as loud as the roar of traffic —Marge Piercy

    See Also: NOISE

17. The music rushed from the bow [of fiddle] like water from the rock when Moses touched it —Henry Van Dyke
18. The music enchanted the air … like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars —Erich Maria Remarque
19. Music is a big sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds —Ouida
20. Music is a sort of dream architecture which passes in filmy clouds and disappears in nothingness —Percy A. Scholes
21. Music is auditory intercourse without benefit of orgasm —Aldous Huxley
22. Music is essentially useless, as life is —George Santayana
23. Music is like wine … the less people know about it, the sweeter they like it —Robertson Davies
24. Music is like a fickle, tantalizing mistress; one is rarely happy with her, but it is sheer tormented hell ever to be long away —Robert Traver
25. Music is … like mathematics, very nearly a world by itself. It contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies —George Santayana
26. Music is not water, but it moves like water; it is not fire, but it soars as warm as the sun —Delmore Schwartz
27. Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light —Claude Debussy
28. Music, like balm, eases griefs smarting wound —Samuel Pordage
29. (Drum, drum, drum, the) music like footsteps —T. Coraghessan Boyle
30. Music may be regarded as a thermometer that makes it possible to register the degree of sensibility of every people, according to the climate in which they live —André Ernest Grétry
31. Music throbbed like blood —T. Coraghessan Boyle
32. Music yearning like a god in pain —John Keats
33. Opera in English makes about as much sense as baseball in Italian —H. L. Mencken
34. The opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge —Cleveland Amory
35. The orchestra sounds like fifty cats in agony —J. B. Priestly
36. Our musicians are like big canisters of gas. Light a match too close to them, and they will explode —Yevgeny Svetlanov, New York Times, October 20, 1986

    Svetlanov, the Moscow State Symphony conductor, thus described Russian musicians in an article by Bernard Holland.

37. The plaintive sound of saxophones moaning softly like a man who has just missed a short putt —P. G. Wodehouse
38. Playing ‘bop’ is like playing ‘scrabble’ with all the vowels missing —Duke Ellington, quoted in New York Herald Tribune, July 9, 1961
39. Pulled music from his violin as if he were lifting silk from a dressmaker’s table —Pat Conroy
40. Saxophones wailing like a litter of pigs —Lawrence Durrell
41. The string section sounded like cats in heat —Mary Hedin
42. (Wade and Beth could hear) the subterranean thudding of his rock music turned low, like a giant heart beating in a sub-cellar —John D. MacDonald
43. A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything —Gustav Mahler

    Mahler’s comment was addressed to Jean Sibelius.

44. To some people music is like food; to others like medicines; to others like a fan —Arabian Nights
45. Tuneless and atonal, like the improvised songs of children caught up in frantic play —Robert Silverberg
46. The written note is like a strait jacket, whereas music like life itself is constant movement, continuous spontaneity, free from restriction —Pablo Casals