After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it's worse than ever.
Interpretation
War impacts all aspects of society, including music, reflecting deep emotional and cultural shifts.
Quincy Jones highlights the profound transformation in music that follows periods of war, as it serves as a response to the emotional and societal upheaval experienced by those who serve. The quote emphasizes how soldiers return to a changed world, feeling disconnected from the very culture they fought to protect, which fosters a new artistic expression in the form of music that captures these sentiments and realities.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the evolution of music during historical events.
Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.
When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.
You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.
I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.
The power of effecting changes for the better is within ourselves, not in the favorableness of circumstances.
Letting go of the past means that you can enjoy the dream that is happening right now.
The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
In sum, the struggle for our future is . . . the struggle between those who cling to patterns of domination and those working for a more equitable partnership world.
There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.
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