Terry Teachout Music Quotations

Does film music really matter to the average moviegoer? A great score, after all, can't save a bad film, and a bad score - so it's said - can't sink a good one.

No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing.

All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.

Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it.

Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music.

I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.

I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember.

Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.

Well into the '40s, it wasn't uncommon for big-budget Hollywood movies to contain little or no underscoring, and many of today's directors, following the lead of Martin Scorsese in 'GoodFellas,' accompany their films with pop records, not original music.

Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.

As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.

There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri.

In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out.

Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.

I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people.