Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I listen to my work, I think, what's so inflammatory about it? It's not really that dissonant. A lot of people who used to hate my stuff have come round to it.
Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.
Talking about the all night concerts, I did some of the first all night concerts back in the 60's with this little harmonium, and I also had saxophone taped delays.
I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had.
The ramifications that you set for yourself can inspire you to do things that you would have never thought of because, once you're trapped, your job is to persevere.
Negative things, and they were all deliberate and I'm not going to say who they were but I know who they were and it was in the business, and that's not a good sign.
We felt we had to know something of his back story. I don't think people in the cinema would just accept that he's there. I think we had to learn how he (got there).
My parents were very unusual. They were pro-women and independence and they wanted me to have my own career. And because of my lineage, every door was opened for me.
Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.
Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.
We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.
I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music.
When you look back on music history, it falls into these neat periods, but of course, the period you yourself are living through seems totally scattered and chaotic.
These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.
As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation.
I am not fitted to give concerts. The audience intimidates me, I feel choked by its breath, paralyzed by its curious glances, struck dumb by all those strange faces.
The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: 'What are we going to do in five years' time?' A completely different attitude.
I just think the time and where I was brought up had a great deal to do in giving me the ambition to kind of get out and do something and not go into the steel mill.
The people who are going into music who hunger, they're going into pop music. There are some badass women who are ambitious and hungry and brave, and they're in pop.
My goodness, you're 60 already, already Time is a thief But still, you're only as old as your tongue And a little bit older than your teeth Have a wonderful birthday
So there is a personal sense of style for a given work - I don't like a general style, but every work has its own style, and I want to create a style for every work.
You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.
After playing now for 60 years, it's still very challenging for me to play a simple melody and have it clean and touch the reed at the proper time in the proper way.
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.
It's a very sweet and often problematic situation where people feel like they know me and they're concerned for me. It creates these strange little intimate moments.
For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me.
Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in.
And as far as the Disney Concert hall is concerned, it is a wonderful modern structure and I am extremely honored that I had this opportunity to have a concert here.
I heard a lot of different kinds of music. I heard country music, I heard jazz, I heard symphonic music, opera, everything you can think of except very modern music.
Morally, the world is both better and worse than it was. We are worse off than in the middle ages, or the 17th and 18th centuries, in that we have the atomic menace.
I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else.
I'm not making any absurd comparisons between myself and Bach, but I aspire to that, that my music will have the legs to survive whatever context it finds itself in.
I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.
An astonishing number of kisses are flying about! I see a whole crowd of them. Ha! Ha! I have just caught three - They are delicious... I kiss you millions of times.
Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.
Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.
You can't just sort of come with, say, 'Yesterday,' or 'A Hard Day's Night,' and it be in the wrong place in the wrong show, and expect the song to work theatrically.
I want to become less and less about the laptop. That's what's lovely about an orchestra - the physicality, the way every gesture relates to something you're hearing.
His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.
The danger of a rock band is repeating oneself. It's our greatest fear - that it evolves into the myopia of a semi-successful band that's in love with its own shadow.
When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.
A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity.
What's happened - in our country, anyhow - is that the young people have shied away from the formality of the concert hall, that tie - and - tails philharmonic image.
Utilizing a unique acoustic blend never heard previously, the Aaron O’Rourke Trio has made a fine debut recording that is sure to please old and new grass fans alike.
I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.
[On golf:] ... though aware I could never be more than a humble potterer, it was impossible to repress the wild upsurgings of hope known to all middle-aged beginners.
It's a mysterious thing that a whole generation of young people can come up and see and understand things that previous generations weren't able to see or understand.
Effective as perspective is... it becomes a deadening influence on an artist's natural way of seeing things once it is accepted as a system - as a mechanical formula.
The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.