Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
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Actually by Bill Nye, possibly confused due to Twain quoting Nye in More tramps abroad, 1897.Mark Twain
Casual listeners will miss the depth of the music. You must sit down with the lyric sheet and find out what's going on. All the vocal acrobatics and weird sounds click into place when you know what ideas, stories and situations they are expressing. In most rock and pop, the music and words may be linked, but are basically separate. Kate creates, more and more, a fusion between the two — the sounds directly expressing the subject. This is a throwback to Wagner's music-drama, with its leitmotifs, turning music into an idea. The Beatles revived the technique, and bands of the hippy era like Pink Floyd carried the banner. . . Kate is fast becoming a master in the use of this sonic montage, perhaps because the ideas she is using are far more complex, have more "resonances", than those of her contemporaries.
Kate Bush
The late Bill Nye once said "I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Samuel Langhorne (Mark Twain) Clemens
The late Bill Nye once said "I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Mark Twain
Whoever said "Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds" was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain Ahab's contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can't get started with even after you have finished reading them.
Clive James
Twain, Mark
Tweed, William Marcy (Boss)
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