Intonation Quotes

There is also a particular frustration that I have with language. It’s so clumsy. And the reason I’m feeling that is more because on your breathing and your intonation than the actual words.

There is no earthly reason why a solo string instrument or voice, having the possibility to play or sing pure intonation, should want, or try, to be tempered.

On matters of intonation and technicalities I am more than a martinet – I am a martinetissimo.

I love Emmylou Harris’s version of my song, ‘Sweet Old World.’ Her intonation is great.

You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.

Saying you love something out loud with the wrong intonation in your face can damn you and destroy what you’re working on.

Of course the most difficult thing on the violin is always intonation. The second one is rhythm. If you play in tune, in time with a good sound that’s already high level. Those three are the main things.

I had a really fantastic dialect coach that I worked very well with, and I was constantly surprised by the different intonations that the Russian dialect has.

If you’re cast right you can actually just let yourself go because all your gestures will be right, all your intonations will be right because you just somewhere understand who this person is.

I just wanted to show people – maybe I’m wrong – that I can still really sing. I can sing better than I ever have before. My intonation is way better, my timing, my phrasing – there’s a lot more expression; I feel it’s a more lived-in, soulful voice.

And sometimes it’s the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn’t belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

I would spend hours absorbing every intonation, every inflection – how the singer would convey a sentiment and how it would sound coming out of their head. All of those things I very carefully watched and absorbed, and so I guess I was studying my whole life, although not in any sort of conventional way.

If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

It’s the periods and the commas that you have to forget about. The words never change, but the intonations change.

The most difficult problem in conducting is intonation. You must know what is wrong and how to correct it.

I never write. Never! I do not even remember if I can write … This is a true freestyle in general. I put a beat, I said some stuff, I retain ideas, I do it again, with a particular intonation, I test, and especially I record live.

I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry.

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

Certainly, the history of my life and the works of art which have especially enriched it is precisely that: the depiction or incantation of a handful of metaphors whose spendour rests upon their intonation.

With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation’s sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

Laughter is the mind’s intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

You speak into it and everything is recorded, voice, tone, intonation, everything. You turn a little wheel, and forth it comes, and can be repeated ten thousand times. Only fancy what this suggests.

The obvious priority is to get your intonation together. Your sound and your pitch should be inspiring to people, not a distraction.

A lot of cats in New Orleans, very soulful, very soulful musicians and they assume that they’re singers. And they just make that assumption. And so when there’s a little intonation problem, people are very forgiving of them because they heard how soulful they play.

I love accents, I would love to find more characters with a variety of vocal intonations. It creates a character. It’s like you’re singing a song. Some people find their character through walking or movement — for me, voice is one of the ways I find parts of the character.

In his 70s, when I was in my 40s, my father still read me the stories he wrote about his childhood. His intonation, his pronunciation of Yiddish, our cackling at his jokes live on.

Intonation is important, especially when it is cold.

Just as a prayer may be merely a mechanical intonation as of a bird, so may a fast be a mere mechanical torture of the flesh.