Art & Creativity Quote by Brian May

Brian May’s line lands like a small act of heresy against the conservatory mindset: the idea that music becomes legitimate only once it’s trapped on a staff. Coming from a guitarist who helped build Queen’s cathedral-scale arrangements, it’s not an anti-intellectual shrug; it’s a declaration of where authority lives. For May, the “text” isn’t paper, it’s the ear. He’s elevating listening - absorbing timbre, phrasing, feel, and the tiny human imperfections that notation can’t encode - over the bureaucratic neatness of dots and bars.

The subtext is also social. “Sheet music” stands in for gatekeeping: credentialed training, the hierarchy of composers over players, the implicit sneer at rock musicians as intuitive amateurs. May flips that power dynamic. By crediting “other people” first, he admits influence without romanticizing originality, then claims intuition as the tool that turns influence into voice. It’s a quietly honest map of creativity: theft, yes, but with taste and internal judgment.

Context matters because May’s work thrives in the margins notation struggles to capture: layered guitar orchestrations, harmonized lines that behave like choirs, tones shaped by gear hacks and touch as much as pitch. His skepticism isn’t about theory being useless; it’s about theory being incomplete. The quote champions a practical, embodied musicianship - one that trusts the feedback loop between ear, emotion, and experimentation over the false security of written permission.