[Music is] a language which we speak and understand but cannot translate

Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one...

I probably won’t play a song the same way tomorrow as I play it today. Only a pitchman says the same thing the same way twice, without varying a word. If music is a language, why don’t people use it with the same subtlety, nuance, and facility as they do the spoken language? Probably because they don’t verbalize with the same vocabulary and tone they once did. It has been said that a people’s character is reflected in their music. Our culture is a perfect example. If people here walk around using one-syllable words with no color, no variety, no shading, how can we expect our musical language to be any different? It’s like the emperor’s new clothes – sure they can sit and make wild noises on their synthesizers and call it music – who questions? But ask them to pull up a chair and play ‘Gal in Calico’ or Temptation,’ or even a straight dramatic version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and they can’t do it. They’re too pretentious. They can’t just play songs.

Music is a kind of harmonious language.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

Music is the universal language of mankind.

to understand a people, you need to wade into their culture. It’s culture that tells their tale. And music is culture.

Because Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands

Language is a gift that puts lyrics to the music of our lives. Without spoken language we wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I love you’. We’d have to say ‘uuurrrgghh’ or hold up a sign. And whether it’s one person’s gentle English or another’s muddy, arrogant French, it’s our language that makes us unapproachable and difficult to understand.

What I want people to engage in, and people already do so, is not only in what others are telling us and what we're telling the others, but in the music that we engage in when we speak. And where that music comes from, language is character, is individual character, is collective character. Language is history too...When we're listening to somebody who doesn't speak exactly like us, it's easy to demonize them, to think that they are less worthy than us. But in the end, we come from that background. We come from others that didn't have the language that we have today. And if we can see the versions, the iterations of the past, in those words, in that music, I think we're going to be more sensitive, compassionate and humble.

Language is its own music.

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.

It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?

Understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it.