A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Music (44 quotes)
Poetry and Song are major means by which speech is purified and strengthened, and poetry and music are extensions of speech, so it is not by chance that most of the English poetry and song of the twentieth century have come out of Ireland and the American south. T. S. Eliot would have been the first to insist upon his debt to W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 18, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 123
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Eliot, T.S. | Poetry
[Music] is no long for listening to but for merging with.
“Reversal of the Overheated Image”, Playboy, December, 1968, p 245
Year: 1968
…rock is not added to the city. It is the city in musical translation
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 20, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 126
Year: 1973
The Rock sound bubble is not for listening to but for wearing and participating in.
“Acoustic Space” tetrad, The Laws of Media, with Eric McLuhan, original, widely distributed draft (1975), p 2
Year: 1975
But the music of non-literate people has no such repetitive cyclic and abstract form as melody. Invention, in a word, is translation of one kind of space into another.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 44
Year: 1962
The ideal of “hi fi” really indicates a new concept of composition rather than performance. If the jazz musician composes in the act of performing, the mike and studio situation being into existence both new composition and new performance.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), p 15-16
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Jazz
Jazz musicians express their distaste for recorded jazz by saying, "It is as stale as yesterday's newspaper.”
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 196
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Jazz
Drawn to McLuhan #8
Jazz would seem to be an effective bridge between highbrow and lowbrow music, much as Chaplin made a similar bridge for pictorial art.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 278
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Jazz
But performance is composition. Such performance insures maximal participation among players and dancers alike. Put in this way, it becomes obvious at once that jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with the many allied forms in painting and in music.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 280
Year: 1964
There is a book by Gillette on this called The Sounds of the City in which he considers rock to be a translation of the musical terms into new environmental noise. What has been missed by all students of jazz and rock is that music is necessarily an extension of human speech and gesture. Rock is the new technological environment noise mediated through the English language. There are obviously some deep and significant reasons why it is only southern speech that serves this purpose in America. Rhythm of northern and more literate talk will not serve the music establishment. The Beatles were Irish[ sic] boys and used “Elizabethan English.” The south is also an oral culture with its roots in Elizabethan English. There is the further factor that only English has the prosity, that is, feet. All other languages have only syllables. The power of English in jazz and rock to accommodate itself to Negro dance and music may have significance here. So far as I know, it is impossible to sing rock in any other language but English. It has been tried.
Letter to Wm. Anthony Seymour, March 7, 1962 (LAC)
Year: 1962
The function of music is to translate the sounds of the environment through language, to humanize the technology of the metropolis by translating those sounds in all their raucous disorder, translating them through the rhythms of a great language.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p. 216
Year: 1973
It’s the same way with music. Melody has given place to the new rock forms. Instead of the tune which goes on and on, we simply have the broken and fragmented harmonics and juxtapositions of rhythm—abstract music. Abstract art or abstract music is art in which we pull out the connections. I understand that you’re going to have a sculpture by Picasso on this campus. Abstract sculpture or abstract art is an art in which there is no visual component. All you have is the acoustic, tactile, kinetic form.
“Living in an Acoustic World,” Public Lecture at the University of South Florida (1970), in “Marshall McLuhan Speaks” transcript, pp 4-5
Year: 1970
When I visit the world of rock, I have to ask what are the functions performed by this kind of activity? What kind of people are sustained and renewed by this kind of art?
Letter to Geoffrey Cannon, September 22, 1970
Year: 1970
For various reasons, which we can discuss at length sometime, it is impossible to have a music that is not based on the rhythms of a particular tongue of speech. Speech is the “hidden” ground for the music as figure in any culture whatever. There are specific and complex reasons why the oral tradition of American Southern speech constitute the only possible ground for jazz and rock. Some of these reasons include the fact that English is almost the only language in the world that has actual feet and not mere syllables. Equally basic is the relation of English to the metropolitan patterns of industrial sound. New technological sounds and patterns are processed through the speech in order to become “music.” To people who do not understand this complex of speech technology factors, it must seem very mysterious that Chinese and Norwegian alike are compelled to sing Rock in English rather than their own tongues.
Letter to John Cage, September 13, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 456
Year: 1972
How far is the development of seven- and twelve-tone scales in our time a switchback to the acoustic from the visual stress in composition?
Review of Paul Klee (1953), p 78
Year: 1953
[Theodore] [1851-1914] is of special importance for an understanding of Joyce, Pound, and Eliot: “The simple clang represents to a certain extent all music. The clang is a rhythmical system built up on a fundamental rhythm. This fundamental rhythm is more or less richly differentiated in the rhythm of the single tones.
“The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry” 1951, reprinted in The Interior Landscape (1969)
Year: 1951
Jazz is a survival gimmick for people harassed by cacophony.
Letter from Sister Mary Joan, West Hartford, Conn, repeating a line he used in a speech
Chapters:
Jazz | McLuhanisms & Zingers
Moreover, I would like to suggest that changing sounds and rhythms in the environment in a highly technological age enter the common speech in undeveloped areas and emerge as popular music for the metropolis. Without this process of transformation, it might well be that we could not live with our technologies.
“Cultural Uniformity—” (1975), p 47
Year: 1975
I suggest that the spoken word is the indispensable medium for processing the non-verbal noises of the industrial environment. This brings us to a strange feature of the English language which is not shared by other languages. English is the only language that has feet as opposed to mere symbols. The iambic and trochaic feet of English (up-beat and down-beat) permits it to have a much deeper relation to movement and multi-sensuous involvement than other Western tongues.
“Jazz and Rock” (unpublished essay, written 1976), p 3
Year: 1976
Chapter:
Speech
The international language is rock and roll. Rock and roll is English. They’ve tried it in German and Danish and it doesn’t work. The international language is being sung at this very hour in Hong Kong and Tokyo.
“The Undiluted Wisdom of Marshall McLuhan,” The Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975, p 13
Year: 1975
The Negro created a music based on language (– New Orleans for “to yatter” that was totally involving of all the senses. We still talk ineptly aout “Negro integration,” ignoring the fact that the title Negro integrated all the countries of the world in the 1920’s. The integration still holds.
“Pound, Playboy of—” (1967), p 6 [or possibly p 8: check]
Year: 1967
[The Beatles] were the first, as far as I know, to put English popular speech – popular lower-class British Cockney rhythms and Liverpool rhythms – into musical form. The English have never had a music directly related to popular speech before. When you make a music that is related to popular speech, it enables the singer to put on the whole audience – the public – as a mask and wear it as a mask. The Beatles are powerful.
“McLuhan: Now the Medium Is the Massage,” in New York Times, March 19, 1967, p D23
Year: 1967
Music veered from the spoken word, to converge again with Bartok and Schoenberg.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, 175
Year: 1964
But it's an interesting sidelight or insight to say that the tradition of church music really was a kind of corporate, communal art shared by all, and that bound the community together.
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 119
Year: 1967
The ballad form was a new vortex. A corporate mask of the pastoral antique.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker, 1968, p 135
Year: 1968
At lest as decisive for the development of music in relation to the spoken word was the coming of the microphone with its numerous adaptations, most of which brought the world of instruments into the orbit of the spoken word.
“Jazz and Rock” (1976) typescript, p 3
Year: 1976
We are living entirely by music
Quoted by B.W. Powe in The Solitary Outlaw (year?), p 72
[Under electronic conditions] Each object and each set of objects engenders its own unique space by the relations it has among others visually or musically.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 148
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Space
One thing that musicologists have not been very explicit about is the human need to put the sounds of the environment through the vital social process of dialogue in order to humanize the merely mechanical sounds of the environment.
“Mr. Eliot and the St. Louis Blues,” in The Antagonish Review, 1974, p 24
Year: 1974
Suddenly the visual boundaries yielded to music; the symbolist poets discovered the acoustic space of auditory imagination.
Counterblast (1969), pp 110-111
Year: 1969
But the phrase or melody does not refer to such attitude or state. It's the state and we're the music.
Counterblast (1969), p 112
Year: 1969
Paradoxically, the alphabet enabled the Greeks to reduce the massive polyphonies of their oral culture by selecting and logically (visually) connecting what had been simultaneous and musical. If the Greek means of abstracting and conceptualizing was by logical connection, the abstract art and science of the twentieth century proceeds by the contrary means of pulling out the “logical” (visual) connections in space and time. This returns that art and philosophy of today to musical form. If the Greek drive to abstraction had been to eliminate the acoustic and musical in favor of visual and logical connectedness, our nonrepresentational and abstract art and science assumes a complementary pattern.
“Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera. 1977, p 377
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Linear and Nonlinear | Twentieth Century
Rock [music] is not something that is merely stuck onto the entertainment card as an extra item but a kind of central oral form of education which threatens the whole educational establishment. If Homer was wiped out by literacy, literacy can be wiped out by rock.
“Living in an Acoustic World,” Public Lecture at the University of South Florida (1970), “Marshall McLuhan Speaks” Transcript, p 3
Year: 1970
If jazz is considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the discontinuous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational, it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which performance is both creation and composition.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, 280
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Jazz
[Regarding Go-go dance halls, later known as discos] Sound, in this kind of world, is not used as something to be listened to, it is kind of full rubber, which you press against and it presses back against you, makes you feel kind of wanted. Sound, in the new world of dance song, it's not for listening, it's for making.
CBC-TV’s “Telescope 67” with Fletcher Markle, 1967; Transcript
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Jazz
The position of auditory space in visual culture is often absurdly high, as in the importance attached to “music” as a separate package deal.
Letter to Edward Hall, Nov. 3, 1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 391
Year: 1969
Conversation is improvisation, so that the new interest in musical improvisation reveals new aspects of the meaning of verbal conversation.
“Jazz and Modern Letters,” in Explorations 7, 1957, p 3
Year: 1957
Radio was inseparable from the rise of jazz culture, as TV has been inseparable from the rise of rock culture.
Item for Encyclopedia Universalis, 1972, p 2 of typescript
Year: 1972
Man uses the press for privacy in public conveyances.
Harry Boyle, M McLuhan at the Bottom of the Sea, 1967
Year: 1967
Performers and singers of jazz and Rock are not specially happy or successful when using any language except English for these effects. It is quite impossible for any kind of song to exist apart from a linguistic ground or base, but there may prove to be a special component in English that favours the forms of jazz and Rock themes. The matter has not been studied.
Sidebar, Explorations 20, 1971, p 107
Year: 1971
Chapter:
English Language
[Le Corbusier] sees Manhattan as “hot jazz in stone,” offering a focus of attention like that which the Negroes have fixed in a music that is “the equivalent of a beautiful turbine running in the midst of human conversations.”
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 85
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Sculpture, Sculptural
And this, too, seems to have something to do with the existence of jazz and rock as art forms that, without an oral tradition of corporate public address, this kind of music would not occur.
“TV as a New Mythic Form” (1970), in Understanding Me (2003), p 159
Year: 1970
"In the electronic age, we're living by music."
Recounted from a 1979 seminar, by B.W. Powe
Chapters:
Electric, Electronic | Today’s Transition