Rhythms Quotations

I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.

Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.

I don't like to define my music. To me, music is pure emotion. It's language that can communicate certain emotions and the rhythms cuts across genders, cultures and nationalities. All you need to do is close your eyes and feel those emotions.

In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.

I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I've used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn't decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.

I always enjoy rhythms and melodies, but I always use my voice as more of an instrument and less of a soapbox for me to say or to preach.

Matt Weiner is very perceptive; there's something about the rhythms and the way people speak that is very authentic to the actor. But there are qualities that are dissimilar. The characters on 'Mad Men' are struggling with pretty profound unhappiness, but I can tell you this is a happy bunch.

At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.

I first heard African drum rhythms and chants at the movies. Then, when I had the opportunity to go to Africa and visit the villages, I heard the real, raw, true rhythms and realised the origins of the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South.

A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.

I do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word.

The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it's increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

I don't understand why people don't use improvisation, especially in comedy films, but also, for me, you get more naturalism, and that's why I like the naturalistic performances and strange rhythms and the way that people genuinely interact captured rather than sort of very mannered performances.

I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

I think the thing about being a film composer is that you have to be pretty eclectic-be able to turn your hand to all sorts of different styles and genres and be familiar with the latest rhythms and the range of an obscure instrument.

Our pediatrician told us her circadian rhythms are off. She sleeps a lot during the day; we're trying to keep her up more each day. We want her to get enough sleep, but we want to get some sleep too. I try to get up with Faye at night, but not every time.

I think rhythms can be more satisfying in the short term - like, more immediately. It can be kind of obsessively and compulsively rewarding.

When you're in the Caribbean, you're having the best time, you're hearing a lot of beats and rhythms that you don't hear in New York sometimes, 'cause then you come back and it's snowing.

There is a real trick to it. Once you learn how chords, notes, rhythms and rhymes work - and these are the tools you need - then you lay in wait for the muse. You lure it in and trap it, and once it's there you try not to wreck it. You try to preserve the beauty of what you've been given and turn it into a song.

When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.

What I'm trying to do, in my own small way, is trying to bring African and Afro-Cuban rhythms into rock.

Yes, I heard my people singing!--in the glow of parlor coal-stove and on summer porches sweet with lilac air, from choir loft and Sunday morning pews--and my soul was filled with their harmonies. Then, too, I heard these songs in the very sermons of my father, for in the Negro's speech there is much of the phrasing and rhythms of folk-song. The great, soaring gospels we love are merely sermons that are sung; and as we thrill to such gifted gospel singers as Mahalia Jackson, we hear the rhythmic eloquence of our preachers, so many of whom, like my father, are masters of poetic speech.

You hear about celebrations and rhythms that fisherman do and participate in together. To see that and be a part of it was an incredible honor.

The sounds and rhythms of words are really important to me.

But other than that, I go from the text and the rhythms of the words. The melody comes from that,

There's a couple of tracks on the new record which is sort of using similar sort of rhythms as the drum and bass tracks but playing it all live. It's a new approach to it.

There was a lot of attention given to continuing the character of the historic Third Ward, and we aligned with certain courses and rhythms in which the structure expressed itself that are reminiscent of things. But it's not a replica of anything, and it's a very contemporary expression of an old idea.

Even when disco went out, I could still make hits. Once I had so much success, every idea became concentrated. I had so much confidence. I knew how the bass should sound, what rhythms would work. The tempos I knew: 110 to 120 BPM. I knew they would dance in the clubs in New York or anywhere.

We feel the pulse ...You can't fake it. Even if the music is not actually on - people of New Orleans actually hear and feel what is called the second line parade rhythm. And really, that is a continuation of the African rhythm that has existed in New Orleans since the beginning. All the rhythms that went through Congo Square and came to the streets in the jazz, those rhythms sort of govern our lives.

It's like, when you can't throw it to anybody else, well, Marcus is going to find a way to get open. And the confidence that Joey is finding in throwing it to me, he's going to get those same rhythms in Chuck and Roy and Mike and Kevin (Johnson).

There is the idea that, when we look at things, it is the yellow light that helps us the most, that we are the most sensitive for. But our circadian rhythms, which are the rhythms that help us to wake and sleep and be alert and relaxed and so forth and so on, they are much more triggered by blue light.

All of the songs have African rhythms and movement. The kids were dancing. Our second grade choir was used for singing as they played the instruments. It sounded really cool.