Collected here for the first time are more than 2,000 wise and witty quotations on every type of music and musicians, from Plato to Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, and a host of other luminaries. What they have to say about composers, concerts, critics, conducting, various instruments, and about music and truth, solitude, women, love, death, war, and health makes a true Bartlett's for music-lovers and -haters alike.

Writing about music-about what it is and what it means-is akin to describing the act of love. Somehow, the reduction of the experience to an unblushingly detailed exposition of how, where, when, and why who does what to whom, from prelude to resolu tion, loses everything in the translation. The other extreme, the one wherein the writer, in desperation, resorts to metaphor (with or without benefit of meter and rhyme), most often results in im agery that is banal, vulgar, inane, obscure, pretentious, and almost always insufferably romantic. To achieve good and accurate writing about music is as...