If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

Illness, insanity, and death were the dark angels that kept watch over my cradle.

-- Edvard Munch

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way.

-- Georgia O'Keeffe

Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

-- Born in France in 1862, Claude Debussy opened new frontiers of harmony and timbre that reshaped Western music. Works like Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, La mer, and his Preludes for piano freed French music from German Romantic dominance and profoundly influenced twentieth-century composers. His sole completed opera, Pelleas et Melisande, offered a radical alternative to Wagnerian music drama. Though he rejected the label, he

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.

-- Born in Salzburg in 1756

The music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought.

-- Born in Hungary in 1811, Franz Liszt

I write music with an exclamation point!

-- Born in Leipzig in 1813