Nadia Boulanger - Music Quotes

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Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us.

Nadia Boulanger

Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.

Nadia Boulanger

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must forget them.

Nadia Boulanger

As far as the execution is concerned... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it.

Nadia Boulanger

In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves — which makes us more indulgent and more understanding — and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.

Nadia Boulanger