Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.
Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian.
I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.
My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them. I devour them with fury.
My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos . . . in this respect this is a savage country.
One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.
Come on, come on! And there'll be no turning back! You were only killing time and it can kill you right back. Come on, come on! It's time to burn up the fuse. You got nothing to do and even less to lose.
That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.
Thus having been undeservedly accepted at the Conservatory as a professor, I soon became one of its best and possibly its very best pupil, judging by the quantity and value of the information it gave me!
I'm very interested, for instance, in music in education - getting young people not only to listen to, but participate in the music that I write. I consider this one of the most vital aspects of my work.
Let me see you do the 'rag time dance'... Turn left and do the 'Cake walk prance'... Turn the other way and do the 'Slow drag'... Now take your lady to the world's fair (...) And do the 'rag time dance.'
Whenever you play dance music, it serves a function. It becomes a utility; you have to worry about the tempos and what you're going to play for people. But when you're playing for listening, you're free.
If there is no criticism, you become lazy. But it should be constructive, and it should be the truth. If it's biased and there's no truth in it, then I don't care about it. If it's true, it helps me grow.
You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
Even though my parents raised me in a very individualistic way, they were also strict and traditional, which was good. It was hard to sneak out! I think I was quite wild, but in some ways quite contained.
Usually, I really only look at any one particular album at a time when I'm making it. I've never really sat and looked at the journey through all of my albums to see if I could find a thread through them.
When we learned to play in bands, what we were covering was equal part the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead. That would defy the logic that somehow these things don't fit in the same musical well.
The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm".
Sometimes I like them artificial and sometimes I like them real. And the reason is because sometimes I like a real close sound. And I like a very specific snare sound and I can't get that in the big room.
It is not possible, given any degree of optimism and generosity in regard to people in general, to set a time limit on creative reflection or a limitation on the number of people involved in the creation.
When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.
I don't know if it is a spiritual, physiological or psychological phenomenon, but I believe now more than ever that singing is a universal, built-in mechanism designed to cultivate empathy and compassion.
There were a lot of people doing new and interesting things with rock. But I wanted to take it farther than that. My real influence was punk. I must have listened to the first Patti Smith album 300 times.
Electronic musicians are quite like writers or painters. They are quite isolated in their home studios. We often don't have that the opportunity to collaborate with that many people, like in rock or jazz.
I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.
Can't we just pursue our lives With our children and our wives Till that happy day arrives How do you ignore All the witches All the curses All the wolves, all the lies The false hopes, the goodbyes . . .
Now is the month of Maying, When merry lads are playing. Fa la la... Each with his bonny lass, upon the greeny grass. Fa la la... The Spring clad all in gladness, Doth laugh at winter's sadness. Fa la la.
I listen to new music by composers who are interesting to me. I listen to some; I don't know if I want to call it pop, but it's some interesting artist that gets my attention, I listen to in the mornings.
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'
We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.
When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
The artist must yield himself to his own inspiration... I should compose with utter confidence a subject that set my musical blood going, even though it were condemned by all other artists as anti-musical.
Come on, come on, and there'll be no turning back, You were only killing time and it can kill you right back, Come on, come on! It's time to burn up the fuse, You got nothing to do and even less to lose...
I just completed a tour in Europe. I played every night. This requires traveling some days for six hours in a van or a train or a car. After six weeks of that, I checked into the hotel and just fell apart.
I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer's task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music.
You could do a 'Les Mis'-type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you're writing a typical song - that's maybe got 10 words per line.
So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.
For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.
I thought that it would be interesting to have a mirror and grab a light and shine it around in different ways. It's an analog to the acoustic reflections that we're going to be trying to activate as well.
These revelations expressed through Art work upon the soul with a force carrying its own conviction and permeate our sentient life with a sense of truth which logic and mere reason are powerless to combat.
If you stop your creative process every time you think you need to cheer yourself up, or rid yourself of emotional conflicts, your life will be over before you can create anything of any real significance.
It is the curse of talent that, although it labors with greater steadiness and perseverance than genius, it does not reach its goal, while genius already on the summit of the ideal, gazes laughingly about.
I felt that I had been influenced by being in the city enough and I wanted to go off by myself to see what was going on. I remember going out there and looking in the mirror and thinking I wasn't anything.
Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply.
Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from work to work rather than specific sibling relationships between the individual work and other members of its stylistic 'family' in the world outside.
Inviting artists to do something, you want it to be a place where they're going to feel challenged and excited and that will maybe open up some new doorway in their own lives or their own creative practice.
As for the symphonic activities... when I was a student at the Eastman School of Music, I became exposed to a lot more musical forms, elements, opportunities, and I fell in love with strings and their uses.
There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.
In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, Heaven knows, anything goes. The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and day's night today.
Well I tried to, but I could never write anything that I liked or was worthwhile. I threw it all out and realized that I had to make a serious study- that my tastes were far more advanced than my abilities.