Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.
Interpretation
Music is a vessel that conveys emotions that are often found in silence.
This quote suggests that music serves as a medium through which we can experience complex emotions and thoughts that are otherwise unexpressed or difficult to articulate. The 'cup' symbolizes how music can contain and channel the profound and often silent feelings that we harbor within ourselves, allowing us to explore deeper aspects of our existence.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of the arts, one might use this quote to illustrate how music enriches our lives.
The creative musician ... is ... the radio receiver, not the broadcasting station. His personal discipline is to improve the quality of the components, the transistors, the speakers, the alloys in the receiver itself, but never to concern himself overmuch with putting out the program. The program is there; all he has to do is receive it as far as possible.
To me, art is the capacity to experience one's innocence: craft is how you get to that point. Maturity in a musician would be the point at which one is innocent at will. At that point the relationship between music and the musician is direct and reliable._x000D_ The relationship with music is always mysterious: when it works, you can never tell. You can never guarantee when it's going to work. You can only to put yourself in a place where it's more likely to happen.
If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.
Even if I don't release it myself, somebody else might hear it and want to record it. When you write a song, it gives it that potential.
Someone once told me that the 'β¦Baby One More Time' video should be me as a superhero fighting a giant robot monster.
My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out.
No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.
I've written some great things. That's a gift, but there's consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.
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