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.
Interpretation
Quincy Jones reflects on his desire for a more engaging music education and the impulse to explore beyond familiar surroundings.
In this quote, Quincy Jones shares his experience of receiving a scholarship to Seattle University, highlighting his aspiration to pursue music arrangements while expressing discontent with the conventional music curriculum. His desire to escape from home signifies a broader yearning for personal growth and the pursuit of one's passions, often necessitating a departure from comfort zones.
In practice
In a speech about pursuing your dreams, this quote can highlight the importance of finding engaging educational experiences.
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 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.
I think the attraction of 'American Idol' is about the basic human nature attitude that is, 'We can put you up there. But we can take you down.'
Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.
One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.
Teachers have told us across the country that what's severely outdated is the teacher at the front of the classroom as the font of knowledge, because as we know, access to knowledge and information is now ubiquitous. So instead, teachers want to help students learn how to think so that they can be lifelong learners.
all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.
It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
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