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Commercial rock ’n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music … an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

— Ralph Ellison Some Questions and Some Answers (1958)

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Music

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.

Invisible Man (1952)

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)

Words are everything and don't you forget it, ever.

Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

All Ralph Ellison quotes →

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The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value.

Lucy Green

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Thomas Carlyle Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

Eduard Hanslick

Above the pitch, out of tune, and off the hinges.

François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ralph Ellison (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.