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.'
Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.
The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.
Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.
Above all, those to whom the care of young minds has been entrusted should see to it that they respect both the smallest and largest animals as beings which, like people, have been summoned to the joy of life.
Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.