Quotes

“There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.” -Sir Thomas Beecham

“Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.” -Robert Benchley

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.” -Leonard Bernstein

“The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music. It is not a vessel into which the composer distills his soul drop by drop, but a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal.” -Pierre Boulez

“The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.” -Benjamin Britten

“Any attempt to exclude the ‘irrational’ is irrational. Any composing strategy which is wholly ‘rational’ is irrational in the extreme.” -John Cage

“Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?” -John Cage

“I didn’t know that music was a style and that it had rules and stuff. I thought it was just sound. I still believe that.” -Ornette Coleman

“Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness–I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.” -Aaron Copland

“Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living.  But serious music was never meant to be soporific.” -Aaron Copland

“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.’” -Aaron Copland

“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.” -Aaron Copland

“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.” -Aaron Copland

Wagner’s music was “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.” -Claude Debussy

“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.” -Edward Elgar

“A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.” -fortune cookie

“An essential ingredient in learning to be a musician is the ability to recognize a parallel case when you’re confronted with one. If things remind you of other pieces when you approach a new piece, you generally catalogue them very quickly so that you can draw upon your accumulated knowledge.” -Chuck Israels

“The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.” -Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz

“And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.”
-William Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done

“When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English… but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.” -H.L. Mencken

“It is not at all pleasing to the ear, not a bit natural. He often plunges into a new key far too brusquely and it is all quite devoid of charm. When it was over, I praised him very highly, for he really deserves it. The poor fellow must have taken a great deal of trouble over it and he must have studied hard enough.” -Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on a flute concerto by F. H. Graf

“I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those that do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down.’” -Bob Newhart

“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” -Charlie Parker

“Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” -Sergei Rachmaninoff

“The moment when one is composing music is not the time to recall the rules that might hold our genius in bondage. We must have recourse to the rules only when our genius and our ear seem to deny what we are seeking.” -Jean Philippe Rameau

“The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief.” -S.A. Sachs

“I always had the impression that he had experienced beforehand what people close to him were going through, as though he had already suffered with them when they were suffering, so that when they came to tell him of it it did not catch him unawares but rather on the contrary reopened old wounds. Wounds that he had already inflicted on himself by his powerful sympathy.” -Arnold Schoenberg on Alban Berg

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.”
-William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” -Igor Stravinsky

“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.” -Igor Stravinsky

“The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.” -Igor Stravinsky

“His first, last and only formal instruction for me was embodied in one word: observe.” -Billy Strayhorn on Duke Ellington

“I’ve never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.” -Virgil Thomson

“Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.” -Henry David Thoreau

“I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.” -Lily Tomlin

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” -Mark Twain

“Music is organized sound.” -Edgar Varèse

“After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.” -Oscar Wilde

“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.” -Frank Zappa